Here's the real story: the 20 - 30 (percent) failure and return rates cited by Avian Securities don't even vaguely resemble what's happening in our business. It's also true that Avian did not contact us while doing their research. Said another way, it's just not true.

Our global reliability data shows that SSD drives are equal to or better than traditional hard disk drives we've shipped. Beyond that, return rates for SSDs are in line with our expectations for new technology and an order of magnitude better than rates reported in the press.

The vast majority of our customers who purchased these drives appreciate the benefits that SSD drives offer: increased durability, fast start up, better reliability and improved access times.

Skeptics may be tempted to accuse Dell of being defensive without offering any data points to back up that denial. But now Lenovo's Matt Kohut is taking the side of his company's fierce rival. Writes Kohut:

I'm not one to defend a competitor here, but I highly doubt that any Tier One vendor is seeing SSD hard disk drives being returned at a 10 percent rate. The article circling the Internet is fear mongering meant to drive readership. On the other hand I do doubt that return rates are as low as traditional hard disk drives though.

Kohut adds a warning: "Worst case if a spinning platter HDD fails, there are clean room services that can open it up and read the data. Today if an SSD drive fails, there is currently no commercially available way to get that data back. Anyone using an SSD drive MUST have backups."

Whether Avian is right or wrong, it is almost guaranteeing the market will be watching - - closely - - SSD failure rates as the coming quarters come and go.