SSDs Are More Reliable Than Hard Drives, According to Data from Backblaze

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 09/14/2022 08:40 AM | source: backblaze | 33 comment(s)

Backblaze's new SSD report for Q2 2022 shows the lifespan of its SSD boot disks powering its backup servers since 2018. Backblaze's latest upgrade proves SSDs' reliability over hard disks.

Backblaze started tracking SSD lifespans when it switched from HDD to SSD backup servers. Due to the newness of the drives, it took five years for the company to notice any notable changes in SSD lifespan behavior compared to HDD boot drive lifespans with the same age.

2018-2021 SSD lifespan records are similar to hard drive failure rates. Year 1 had the lowest HDD and SSD failure rates, both around 0.6%. Year two increases HDD and SSD failure rates by 0.85%. Both SSDs and HDDs show comparable failure rate curves in years 3 and 4, while SSDs are lower overall. HDDs linger at 1.8% while SSDs have barely passed 1%. Things diverge.

In year 5, SSDs start to overwhelm. HDD boot drive failure rates grow from 2% to 3.6% within a year. Backblaze's SSDs drop from 1.05% to 0.92%. SSDs are 3x more reliable than HDDs. SSDs have no moving parts, so this isn't surprising. Still, it's excellent to have actual data based on thousands of drives indicating that SSD life expectancy will much outperform traditional drives, especially once storage gets old. Excessive writes or poorly designed firmware and controllers can still cause SSD failure.

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gQx
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Posts: 47
Joined: 2021-07-31

#6050336 Posted on: 09/14/2022 09:22 AM

well someone gotta do something about that... long live capitalism!!!

allesclar
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Joined: 2004-09-04

#6050353 Posted on: 09/14/2022 10:25 AM

Results based on a 4 year life span.

Will be interesting to see the results of hard drives say between 4 and 10 years life span.

It would also be interesting to see the failure rate curve versus the warranty period. Is it a steady decline in reliability or a sharp drop i wonder?

Maddness
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Joined: 2014-10-24

#6050358 Posted on: 09/14/2022 10:35 AM

I've spoken to a few people in I.T and System Builders and they predominantly recommend SSD's over Hard Drives. I have several 1TB Western Digital Blacks gathering dust. My main PC has all SSD's and i'm fine with that.

Pryme
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#6050374 Posted on: 09/14/2022 11:17 AM

My older SSD is 11 years old, Crucial M4 128GB, was main SDD for 3 computers, and now runs as secondary. Did a lot of test and all of them reports 100% life span so I believe is true. I bought more SSDs over the years of many brands, never had a problem.

My IT team opened more warranty cases for HDDs compared to SSDs in the last years, and we are talking about 3000 machines, some machines are from 2013/2014 and their SSDs are perfect. The only advantage for the HDDs is that usually degrade performance and is possible to predict problems over that behavior. Even HP accepted a warranty for a HDD based on a report of Crystal Disk Info, even when their diagnostics didn't gave any warning, or maybe our partner is a cool guy. In my opinion, get an SSD, prices are really good nowadays, easy to find 500GB for 50€ now.

As for HDDs, and nowadays is easy to collect a lot quantity of them, is usefull for some regular backups.

Dribble
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Joined: 2019-01-18

#6050415 Posted on: 09/14/2022 12:45 PM

The big advantage of harddrives is they tend to fail more gradually - even if it's going wrong you can still get most of the data off it. In my experience when an SSD fails it goes from working fine to completely dead instantly. I have had that happen to a crucial M4 128GB back in the day as it happens.

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