[bravo22]

The most charitable way I can read their statement is that the resistors are too large for the pad, and along with poor solder material it forms a weak joint which breaks over time.

I have a hard time accepting that because there is not a lot of heat on that line nor is there a lot of physical stress, like constant vibration on SSDs.

[nrp]

These SSDs are tiny. The controllers can easily get up to 80C during sustained writes, so there could be mechanical stress from thermal cycling. (Source: we also make small USB-interfaced high-speed storage devices and do a range of reliability testing for stuff like this)

[bravo22]

On the SSD chip sure. This looks like a resistor on the data line. The resistor would certainly not get to reflow temp.