Tech

BackBlaze confirms results: SSD reliability is superior to that of hard drives

A couple of weeks ago we wondered about the useful life of SSDs and today we have new data that confirms their high reliability, higher than hard drives according to BackBlaze tests whose conclusions have been published by our colleagues at MCPRO.

BackBlaze is a company specialized in cloud storage that uses nearly 100,000 storage units in its data center, working by the piece (24/7) and adding millions of operating hours. By using the error rate of your own infrastructure, it is a good barometer to assess the situation.

If its annual reports were focused on hard drives until now, a few months ago it published the first reliability report on solid-state drives after having introduced them in its infrastructure in 2018. It should be noted that its installed base of SSDs is still very small compared to hard drives and not enough time has passed for the drives to wear down. In any case, the initial tests confirm: SSDs have fewer failures than hard drives.

SSD reliability

SSD reliability and life time

The debate about the reliability of SSDs began a decade ago when some product series had performance problems. Today there are no doubts. Solid state drives are more reliable than the hard drives they have completely replaced in the client storage segment. And they intend to do the same in servers and data centers.

Let us remember that SSDs are based on NAND flash memories and do not have any moving parts, which gives them a huge advantage (in almost all sections) compared to hard drive mechanisms. But nothing lasts forever, and these drives, like any electronic product that uses flash memory to store information, have a limited life simply by design.

The wear of the memory cells is something inherent to this technology and the successive writes they erode individual memory cells both in capacity and performance. For this reason, SSDs include additional free memory cells so that when the first ones fail, they do not lose storage capacity. Plus, they automatically reallocate bad sectors so you don’t lose data or performance.

By their very design, solid-state drives are more sensitive than hard drives to potential power failures while they are running and, as we have explained, memory blocks have a limited number of write operations before failing.

The industry accepts an average of about 700 Tbytes of data written to a consumer drive before problems start. It is a huge amount that the vast majority of users will not reach and in addition, the manufacturers include a 5-year guarantee for them.

Summarizing what we already knew

An SSD won’t last forever due to wear and tear on the memory cells, but the extra cells that act as replacements, the high write data support, the warranty and the mean time between failures, ensure a good number of years of use. In greater numbers and with fewer errors than those of hard drives.

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