SSDs more reliable than hard disks

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Well, given that there are no delicate movable parts, we kind of always knew this, but numbers don’t hurt. Backup and cloud-storage company Backblaze published data comparing the long-term reliability of SSDs to traditional hard drives (HDD) in its data center. Based on data collected since the company started using SSDs as boot drives in late 2018, SSDs are failing at a much lower rate than its HDDs as the drives age. The difference is clearly felt after five years of use: the hard-drive fail rate climbs dramatically, from 1.83% in year 4 to 3.55% in year 5, whereas Backblaze’s SSDs conk out at the same steady rate of 1%.

However, Andy Klein, Backblaze’s director of technical marketing, predicts that SSDs could soon “hit the wall” and start failing at higher rates due to the wear on the NAND flash chips. If that were to happen, low-capacity SSDs would give out at a higher rate than the ones with a higher capacity, since SSDs with more chips have a higher write tolerance. Watch this space…

⇨ Ars Technica, Andrew Cunningham, “Five years of data show that SSDs are more reliable than HDDs over the long haul.”

2022-09-14