SSD reliability is only slightly better than HDD, Backblaze says

In context: Backblaze is a California-based firm coping with cloud storage and knowledge backup providers. Yearly, the group supplies some fascinating reliability knowledge in regards to the massive fleet of storage items employed in its 5 knowledge facilities all over the world.

For the primary time, Backblaze’s newest report on storage drive reliability is specializing in Strong State Drives (SSD) quite than HDD items alone. The corporate began utilizing SSDs within the fourth quarter of 2018, using the NAND Flash-based items as boot drives quite than data-storing drives. Backblaze makes use of consumer-grade drives, offering Annualized Failure Fee (AFR) details about 13 completely different fashions from 5 completely different producers.

The 2022 Drive States review relies on knowledge recorded from 2,906 SSD boot items, Backblaze states, and it’s primarily confirming what the corporate was saying in its 2022 mid-year report. SSDs are extra dependable than HDDs, Backblaze says, as they present a decrease AFR fee (0.98%) in comparison with HDDs (1.64%).

The truth that the distinction in reliability stage is not precisely staggering (0.66% AFR) is quite stunning, nevertheless, as SSDs are primarily simply transferring electrons via reminiscence chips whereas arduous drives should take care of a posh (and failure-prone) mechanism using spinning platters and very delicate learn/write magnetic heads.

The explanations behind failing drives aren’t recognized, as solely an SSD producer would have the gear wanted to make a dependable diagnose. For 2022, Backblaze says that seven of the 13 drive fashions had no failure in any respect. Six of these seven fashions had a restricted variety of “drive days” (lower than 10,000), the corporate concedes, that means that there’s not sufficient knowledge to make a dependable projection about their failure charges.

An fascinating tidbit about Backblaze’s report is that the corporate hasn’t used a single SSD unit made by Samsung, which is a significant participant within the SSD shopper market. One doable clarification is that Samsung drives aren’t low cost, and Backblaze is basically utilizing the most affordable drives they’ll purchase in bulk portions.

Apart from the small distinction in reliability between HDDs and SSDs, one other (disagreeable) shock coming from the most recent Backblaze report is how ineffective SMART reporting might be in terms of solid-state disks. The Self-Monitoring, Evaluation, and Reporting Know-how (SMART) attributes have been traditionally used to report and analyze HDD’s basic well being, however SSD producers are utilizing these stats inconsistently and in a non-standardized method. This implies which you could’t make a legitimate comparability between completely different drive fashions primarily based on SMART stats alone.