An internal study by cloud backup company Backblaze shows that the failure rate of SSDs during the first fourteen months is not very far below that of traditional hard drives. After that period, 1.38 percent of HDDs failed. For SSDs, this was 1.05 percent.
Backblaze has been using classic hard drives in its server parks since 2014 and solid state drives in new server parks since mid-2018 and in the event of defects of the classic variants. Backblaze speaks of a defect as soon as the storage medium stops functioning or when it can deduce from the SMART status that a defect is imminent. The company monitors the drives’ SMART status reports for this purpose.
Next, Backblaze states that the comparison was made between boot drives that the company uses in its own server park. The company does clarify that these drives also regularly perform read and write operations and store log files. “The term boot drive is therefore misplaced in our case,” it sounds.
Due to the age of disks, a one-to-one comparison could not be called reliable. The company then looked at periods in the lifecycles of both technologies about which it had enough information and then compared the failure rate.
“It’s striking that both storage technologies show the same patterns during the first four years of their lifespan,” said Backblaze’s Andy Klein. “From the fifth year, the failure rate of the classic hard drives started to increase. We therefore wonder whether we will see the same pattern with the SSDs.”
ssd hdd fail rate