Solid state drives (SSDs) have become the preferred choice over hard disk drives (HDDs) due to their lack of moving components, inherent magnetic resistance, ability to withstand shock, and overall durability. However, a recent publication from cloud storage provider Backblaze reveals that SSD failures are as common as hard disk drives.
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Often favored for their increased speed, reduced footprint, and increased durability, SSDs have become a standard storage alternative for everyone – from gamers to data centers. A recent blog post by Backblaze's Andy Klein, however, tells a very different story about their supposed reliability and longevity.
Backblaze is a cloud storage and backup provider with four data centers in the US and Europe, and they rely on SSDs and HDDs for server boot drives, log storage, system diagnostics, and various system reporting tasks. Both types of drives serve the same function in Backblaze environments and support continuous file writes, reads, and deletions, in addition to server startup functions.
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In the company's most recent annual failure rate (AFR) data, they compared the statistics for SSDs and HDDs running the same workloads in the same cloud storage environments. The data tells us that SSDs actually fail at a much lower rate than hard drives, however, Klein highlights the fact that many of the hard drives listed were several years older than their SSD equivalents.
Backblaze’s AFR data, which shows failure rates for hard drives (HDDs) from 2014 and SSDs from 2018, reveals a remarkably similar pattern for HDD failure rates (from 2014 to 2017) and SSD failure rates (2018 to 2021). This initial trend paves the way for an interesting question: will SSD failures continue on the same trend? If so, we would expect to see a spike in SSD failure rates in the final quarters of 2021 that would continue for years to come.
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Backblaze regularly publishes findings on data drive failures. While the data is far from conclusive, it raises the question of whether SSDs are truly more reliable and a better investment than hard disk drives (HDDs) for certain workloads and scenarios.
Information source: techspot.com
