Do traditional hard drives (HDDs) or fast solid state drives (SSDs) last longer? This question cannot be answered comprehensively even today, but statistics from the inventory of the cloud storage operator Backblaze provide a clear trend – even if only in relation to “cloud use”.
SSDs in the cloud
Backblaze only started equipping its own data centers with SSDs a few years ago. Thus, the experience does not go back as far as with the HDDs, for which Backblaze has been keeping failure statistics for a long time and publishing them regularly.
The cloud operator had already provided initial insights beforehand the failure rates of SSDs, which were only used as boot drives for a few years. Even then there was a tendency in favor of purely electronic SSD technology over mechanical HDDs.
New statistics see the SSDs clearly at an advantage< /h2>
New numbers are now being added that take a longer period of use into account. Until the end of 2018, the company still used HDDs as boot drives, from then on they were replaced by SSDs. Graphs now compare the average annualized failure rate (AFR) of both disk types over the years.
This shows that the failure rate for HDDs increases sharply from the fifth year: from around 1.8 percent in year four, it's already around 3.6 percent in year five, 5.2 percent in year six, 6.3 percent in year seven and 6.9 percent in year eight.
For SSDs, the AFR is significantly lower at around 1 percent in year four and 0.9 percent in year five and does not increase. It remains to be seen whether this also applies to the years to come, because the corresponding database is missing.
Backblaze sees the assertion that SSDs are more reliable than HDDs as confirmed . At least that applies to this area of application as a boot data carrier in your own servers. Such an outcome was to be expected, after all the mechanics of HDDs wear out, which does not exist at all with SSDs.
Failure rates will continue to be observed
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The SSD statistics are continued. Then we will see when the failure rates will increase. Since the NAND flash memory of the SSDs only survives a certain number of write cycles, this would be a reason for an increase in failures. Backblaze also wants to investigate how far an SSD can be used beyond its guaranteed write volume (Total Bytes Written).