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BackBlaze starts to report on SSD reliability, which they are bigtime.
We all know (well most of us) that datacenter giant Backblaze, from our many HDD failure rate reports. Withing the results they however have never posted the reliability on SSDs. Times are changing fast and they no offer their first results and show that SSDs are massively more reliable.
BackBlaze - We use SSD drives in several places, but we currently do not use them for storing customer data—that remains in the realm of hard disk drives. But one place we have both HDDs and SSDs is as boot drives for our storage servers. In our case, describing these drives as boot drives is a misnomer as this cohort is also used to store log files for system access, diagnostics, and more. In other words, these boot drives are regularly reading, writing, and deleting files in addition to their named function of booting a server at startup.A little over two years ago, Backblaze started using SSDs as boot drives. It was about that time we could start getting SSDs that were 200GB or so for less than $50 each, which was our price point for the 500GB hard drives we were buying.
What we have are two groups of drives, one HDDs and the other SSDs, which have performed the same functions in the same environment over time. The table below compares the failure rates in aggregate for Q1 2021 of our HDD and SSD boot drives.
Why didn’t we break these out by model? None of the models by themselves had enough drive days to be statistically relevant. In aggregate, the number of drive days is still on the lower side, but the obvious difference in the AFR between the HDD and SSD boot drives is eye-opening. If we look at the lifetime results for the HDD and SSD boot drives, the difference in AFR is less but still significant.
SSD Reporting Moving Forward
One obvious takeaway from these tables is that SSD drives fail less often than HDD drives, at least in this use case. But that ignores one important factor, drive age. If we focus on the age of each of the cohorts, there are potential cracks in our “SSD drives are better” supposition.The average age of the SSD drives is 12.7 months, and the average age of the HDD drives is 49.6 months. The oldest SSD drives are about 30 months old and the youngest HDD drives are 24 months old. The oldest HDD drives are nearly 96 months old—eight years old. Basically, the timelines for the age of the SSD and HDD drives don’t overlap very much and in general, drive failure rates typically increase as drive population ages. These two considerations make the conclusion that SSDs fail less often than HDD drives not as clear cut as it first seems. Over the coming months, we’ll dig into the data and align the SSD and HDD timelines to examine the HDD drives in their early years of use and we’ll publish those results. This will give us better insight into the failure rate profile over time for the HDD drives. In addition to the boot drives, we also utilize SSD drives for different use cases, for example on restore servers and so on. Over time, our goal is to instrument these drives as well without impacting performance, so we can build a library of SSD drive failure rates by use case.
Backblaze Outs 2020 Hard Drive Stats for HDDs - Reliability Increased - 02/02/2021 10:10 AM
In 2020, Backblaze added 39,792 hard drives and as of December 31, 2020 we had 165,530 drives under management. Of that number, there were 3,000 boot drives and 162,530 data drives....
Backblaze Outs Q2 2020 Hard Drive Stats for 142,630 Spinning HDDs - 08/19/2020 02:33 PM
As of June 30, 2020, Backblaze had 142,630 spinning hard drives in our cloud storage ecosystem spread across four data centers. Of that number, there were 2,271 boot drives and 140,059 data drives....
Backblaze Shares Hard Drive Stats for Q1 2020 - 05/13/2020 02:58 PM
As of March 31, 2020, Backblaze had 132,339 spinning hard drives in their cloud storage ecosystem spread across four data centers. Of that number, there were 2,380 boot drives and 129,959 data drives....
QNAP Integrates Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage to NAS Servers - 04/27/2020 12:12 PM
QNAP announced its collaboration with Backblaze for the integration of Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage into several QNAP solutions, including HybridMount, VJBOD Cloud, and Hybrid Backup Sync 3 (HBS 3). W...
Backblaze Publishes Hard Drive Stats for 2019: Failure rates on the rise - 02/12/2020 04:42 PM
Backblaze published its 2019 hard drive failure rates for the data drive models in operation in their data centers. Backblaze had 124,956 spinning hard drives. Of that number, there were 2,229 boot d...
schmidtbag
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#5910609 Posted on: 05/07/2021 05:12 PM
Lets forget for a moment that SSDs are pure electronics, while HDDs are mechanical devices spinning at thousands RPM and held together by PURE MAGIC.
Even without the above bleeding obvious fact and just relying on Backblaze stats I still wouldn't count on SSDs getting much worse down the line.
Why?
Because being only 1 year old on average, SSDs failure rates are negatively affected with the out-of-the-factory phenomena.
Basically some products are stillborns doomed from the very start, and will fail instantly or few months down the line.
Now that they have failed, what we are left with is a healthy population of SSDs. So that that 0.58% AFR for SSDs is not going to get much worse (if any) 12 months from now.
Well, the same is said of HDDs, or really anything electronic. Ever heard of the bathtub curve? In the case of SSDs, the "tub" is just really shallow, and drives that aren't "stillborn" have a reasonably predictable lifespan.
Lets forget for a moment that SSDs are pure electronics, while HDDs are mechanical devices spinning at thousands RPM and held together by PURE MAGIC.
Even without the above bleeding obvious fact and just relying on Backblaze stats I still wouldn't count on SSDs getting much worse down the line.
Why?
Because being only 1 year old on average, SSDs failure rates are negatively affected with the out-of-the-factory phenomena.
Basically some products are stillborns doomed from the very start, and will fail instantly or few months down the line.
Now that they have failed, what we are left with is a healthy population of SSDs. So that that 0.58% AFR for SSDs is not going to get much worse (if any) 12 months from now.
Well, the same is said of HDDs, or really anything electronic. Ever heard of the bathtub curve? In the case of SSDs, the "tub" is just really shallow, and drives that aren't "stillborn" have a reasonably predictable lifespan.
nosirrahx
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Joined: 2013-04-05
Senior Member
Posts: 392
Joined: 2013-04-05
#5910678 Posted on: 05/07/2021 11:45 PM
I have seen 1 NVMe SSD fail ever.
Back when SSDs came to the SATA 150 interface I had a bunch fail.
SSDs are very reliable. I've been running SSDs for as long as the Vertex 2 lineup and so far only my original vertex 2 died. I have an old 120GB Mushkin drive that i will replace soon by a 2TB Samsung one not because it doesn't work anymore but because well 120GB today is nothing lol. I have 6 ssds/nvme in my pc.
I have seen 1 NVMe SSD fail ever.
Back when SSDs came to the SATA 150 interface I had a bunch fail.
Truder
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Posts: 1878
Joined: 2007-01-16
#5910703 Posted on: 05/08/2021 03:02 AM
Here's a question... Aren't HDDs repairable? As long as the disk isn't damaged, data can potentially be recovered in the event of failure and so drives can be repaired, presenting the option of still being reliable long term storage? (Often HDD failures are due to their controller boards or read/write heads). SSDs on the otherhand have predictable endurance, especially when considering the type of cells used? (QLC have what, 1000 writes per cell?) and over time cells become unreadable (of course the same can be said for hard drives too but that's usually a result of mechanical damage, heads literally damaging a sector for example). Still, I find non-volatile memory fascinating.
While we have here rates of failure over 4 years for HDDs and just 1 year for SSDs, what's to say that after 4 years, SSDs wouldn't fail at increasing rates?
Here's a question... Aren't HDDs repairable? As long as the disk isn't damaged, data can potentially be recovered in the event of failure and so drives can be repaired, presenting the option of still being reliable long term storage? (Often HDD failures are due to their controller boards or read/write heads). SSDs on the otherhand have predictable endurance, especially when considering the type of cells used? (QLC have what, 1000 writes per cell?) and over time cells become unreadable (of course the same can be said for hard drives too but that's usually a result of mechanical damage, heads literally damaging a sector for example). Still, I find non-volatile memory fascinating.
While we have here rates of failure over 4 years for HDDs and just 1 year for SSDs, what's to say that after 4 years, SSDs wouldn't fail at increasing rates?
GSDragoon
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Posts: 371
Joined: 2006-11-29
#5910710 Posted on: 05/08/2021 04:24 AM
Not sure how useful this data is without running both types of drives with the same workload.
Not sure how useful this data is without running both types of drives with the same workload.
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SSDs are very reliable. I've been running SSDs for as long as the Vertex 2 lineup and so far only my original vertex 2 died. I have an old 120GB Mushkin drive that i will replace soon by a 2TB Samsung one not because it doesn't work anymore but because well 120GB today is nothing lol. I have 6 ssds/nvme in my pc.