Good news – SSDs aren’t really getting any less reliable
Cloud storage And backup company Backblaze, which has become synonymous with its regular SSD and HDD reliability tests, has just announced new figures that will be very pleasant to read for most users.
This time, the company approached its report by considering the statistics from the first six months of 2023, making it the most up-to-date research we have on the state of the market.
With 3,144 SSDs in the storage servers, the figures have also become more reliable compared to last year’s year-end report, when the company had 2,558 SSDs on the books.
SSDs remain reliable
By comparing the number of drives it has to the number of failures experienced, in addition to other factors such as the age of the device, Backblaze can produce what it calls annual failure rates (AFR).
In the second quarter of 2023, SSD AFRs rose to 1.05%, up from 0.96% during the first three months of the year. In reality, these numbers are not a cause for concern: the 2022 AFR is 0.98% for the year and the 2021 AFR is 1.05%.
Still, the company’s SSD reporting remains slightly less reliable than the figures the company produces for HDDs purely based on the fact that there are fewer SSDs. Backblaze said it “would like to see at least 100 rides and 10,000 driving days in a given quarter as a minimum before (it) begins to consider the calculated AFR as ‘reasonable’.”
Of the 14 different SSD models it uses, only four (29%) meet these criteria, while two others fall just short of the ideal minimum number of days. In contrast, 26 of the 29 HDDs in Backblaze’s books, or 90%, met the criteria.
In reality, the latest numbers aren’t much different from Backblaze’s lifetime AFRs. Since it ranked SSDs in 2018, their AFRs have averaged 0.90%.
What it does show is that SSDs have favorable reliability scores compared to HDDs, with the latter experiencing annual growing AFRs to the point that HDDs had an AFR of 1.37% at the end of 2022.