SSDs Are More Reliable Than Hard Drives, According to Data from Backblaze
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gQx
well someone gotta do something about that... long live capitalism!!!
allesclar
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
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
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
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.
Alessio1989
That's like the discover of warm water 😀
RavenMaster
Makes sense. HDD's are prone to mechanical failures because they have moving parts inside them. SSD's do not.
TheDeeGee
What about offline storage?
Does a SSD still have it's data after being without power for 10 years?
RealNC
Well, HDDs seem like they're built to fail now. My IBM SCSI drive from 1994 is still working.
And not just HDDs. Even my mom's old washing machine from 1978 still works.
The majority of old HDDs I actually had to retire because they were getting too slow and too small for modern computers. My modern HDDs I had to replace because they failed.
-Tj-
My intel 330 180gb is now probably 10years old, I use it as main OS disk and it's still in "mint condition", so I guess no worries..
GlassGR
last month a brand new 480 gb ssd installed in an older system was not recognized at all and yesterday a 960 gb ssd installed for 3 months failed to boot (it was listed in bios as "firmware" no capacity ,no model name ).
Both of them had no data to recover.
I still have 10 years old ssds that operate just fine but newer models seem to have serious quality and reliability issues.
schmidtbag
I have a budget 2TB SATA SSD that is super flaky. Sometimes I just reboot and it is unrecognizable, other times it works flawlessly for months of uptime. Not everything I plug it into struggles with it equally. It's honestly pretty annoying, and confusing.
TLD LARS
They count numbers of drives right?
SSD are maybe 3 times more reliable, but 4-5 of them are mostly needed to have the same capacity as a HDD.
HDD should still be more reliable per TB space.
heffeque
That's a weird way of measuring drive reliability, but I'll allow it.
Wanting to put SSD on my NAS to make it completely silent, but 6-8 TB per drive of HDD is definitely much more expensive than SSD.
Agonist
I only stick to major brands for SSDs in my rig. WD, Samsung,etc and my Aorus Elite is the only different brand I have used without any issue for over a year now.
I have a 12 year old OCZ 60GB SSD in my retro rig, still works perfect. 99% health too. The intel 320 40GB works perfectly too. Its just as old I think.
Ill use cheap SSD for builds for clients depending on their budgets and use. But I usually try to stay away from the chinese crap branded SSD.
TheDeeGee
Very happy with Crucial storage myself.
Venix
Huh?! I actually never thought of it from that point of view ! My thought was on individual drive failure ! But you are right for someone like blackblaze it seems that hdds are still more reliable per TB than ssds !
Agonist
I have never heard anything bad ever about Crucial SSDs. I just never seem to catch them on a deal. I never pay full price lol.
I only paid $94( was $139) for my 500 Aorus Elite NVME PCIE 4, $50 for 2 860 evo 1TBssd, and only $289 for my WD 4TB SSD, was $375 at the time.
Ven0m
Well, you'll hear from me 🙂
I've got quite a few SSDs, and had some failures. One was OCZ Vertex 128, which survived quite a long time despite being used as OS drive when Windows wasn't optimized for SSDs (bought in 2009). The others were Crucials around 500GB and overprovisioning haven't saved them. C4 bought around 2012 failed. The replacement C4 failed just before warranty ran out. They replaced it with MX500, which was running fine. So I got another MX500. After a few years, it started losing data. This gives me 4 failures for 2 purchases. It won't surprise anybody that I'm worried about losing the other one too. Of course the current ones are made with other components, but I can't trust them anymore.
user1
drive failures are very model dependent , If you look at backblaze's stats, you'll find that there are a few stinkers among them that push the failure the stats up, some drives with very low failure rates <1% after 5 years, and others >3% failure rate. this is true of both ssds and hard-drives.
