As speedy solid-state drives started to rise as a sensible various to the decades-old exhausting drive for shoppers, early adopters fearful that their new SSDs would fail quicker and extra regularly. However that may not be the case now, if it ever was. In response to the newest Drive Stats report from on-line backup service Backblaze, its SSDs are failing at a persistently decrease price than old school exhausting drives. If the information may be replicated, it signifies that one of many final benefits (or perceived benefits) of the exhausting drive is disappearing.
Backblaze examined its SSDs performing the identical duties it beforehand assigned to exhausting drives after a full firm transition in 2018. This consists of serving as boot drives, main storage, short-term SMART storage, et cetera. After 4 years of aggregated knowledge, the SSDs from quite a lot of producers are exhibiting a failure price of 1.05%, effectively beneath the 1.83% failure price of exhausting drives over the earlier four-year interval. Dramatically, the SSDs confirmed a 0.00% failure price of their first yr of service in comparison with .66% for exhausting drives. Even probably the most pessimistic projections present the SSDs outperforming exhausting drives for reliability by a substantial margin.
Backblaze
The corporate’s industrial servers embody storage drives in quite a lot of sizes from Seagate, Western Digital, Micron, Dell, and Essential. Throughout greater than 2,500 examined drives, these most liable to failure had been the Seagate ZA500CM10003 and ZA250CM10002, each in 250GB capacities. These fashions are offered to shoppers as 2.5-inch SATA drives below the Baracua label.
However the general knowledge isn’t notably damning to Seagate as a model: these fashions had been primary and quantity two when it comes to the variety of drives examined with an remoted failure price of simply 0.3% and 0.4%, respectively. Probably the most dependable drive with greater than 100 models in testing was the DellBOSS VD, a PCI-based drive that reported zero failures throughout 351 models. Sadly, it isn’t offered to shoppers.
What’s the takeaway for shoppers? Contemplating the truth that the common PC consumer is nearly definitely not pushing their storage as exhausting as an internet backup service, you should purchase SSDs from main manufacturers with a excessive diploma of confidence of their reliability, no less than as a lot if no more so than older exhausting drives. When you ought to all the time again up your important knowledge (and now we have some suggestions on that, together with Backblaze!), you may put away no less than a point of tension over your costly new solid-state storage.
