Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, September 14 (Xinhua)-- most people may think that solid state drives (SSD) are faster, but not as long-lived and reliable as mechanical drives (HDD), but a new report finds that this may not be the case.

Cloud backup and storage provider Backblaze released its second-quarter 2022 SSD report that solid-state drives are more reliable than mechanical drives, at least in terms of the tens of thousands of hard drives deployed in its data centers, but the company also said that could change in the future as solid-state drives age.

It is reported that Backblaze's SSD and HDD are used as boot disks, not disks for data storage, and Backblaze switched to SSD in the fourth quarter of 2018, which means that the two hard drives are at different points in their life curves, so the company only compared SSD with an average age of one year to HDD with an average age of one year, and so on.

The latest year's data show that the failure rate of SSD has shown a downward trend.

Comparison of failure rate between Backblaze SSD and HDD

CTOnews.com learned that Andy Klein, Backblaze's chief cloud storage evangelist, said: "now we can reasonably claim that SSD is more reliable than HDD, at least when used as a boot drive in our environment."

However, he warns that the failure rate of "high probability" SSDs will eventually start to pick up, and it is possible that SSDs used by Backblaze may "hit the extreme" at some point, perhaps when they start to reach their flash wear limit.

The chart shows that from 2018 to 2021, the failure rate of the two hard drives was the lowest in the first year, with the failure rate of HDD less than 0.66%, while SSD had no failure rate at all. The situation in the second year was almost exactly the same linear increase, with the failure rate of HDD and SSD increasing by about 0.85%. The same is true of the linear increase in failure rate in the third and fourth years. Both SSD and HDD show the same failure rate curve, but the overall failure rate of SSD is lower. In the fourth year, HDD hovered around 1.8 per cent, while SSD barely exceeded 1 per cent.

Then things changed. The failure rate of HDD rose sharply in the fifth year, jumping from less than 2 per cent to 3.6 per cent in one year. At the same time, SSD is moving in the opposite direction, from 1.05% to 0.92%, which means that SSD is three times more reliable than HDD.

There is a view that solid state drives have no moving parts, so their reliability must be higher than mechanical hard drives, while over-writing or poorly designed firmware and master drives lead to fatal failures in SSD, an exception that only affects a small number of people.

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