| Title | SSD Reliability is Only Slightly Better Than HDD, Backblaze Says | |
| Date | Tuesday March 14 2023, @02:12PM | |
| Author | janrinok | |
| Topic | ||
| from the more-data-for-spreadsheet-nerds dept. | ||
A surprising outcome for the first SSD-based AFR report:
Backblaze is a California-based company dealing with cloud storage and data backup services. Every year, the organization provides some interesting reliability data about the large fleet of storage units employed in its five data centers around the world.
For the first time, Backblaze's latest report on storage drive reliability is focusing on Solid State Drives (SSD) rather than HDD units alone. The company started using SSDs in the fourth quarter of 2018, employing the NAND Flash-based units as boot drives rather than data-storing drives. Backblaze uses consumer-grade drives, providing Annualized Failure Rate (AFR) information about 13 different models from five different manufacturers.
The 2022 Drive States review is based on data recorded from 2,906 SSD boot units, Backblaze states, and it is essentially confirming what the company was saying in its 2022 mid-year report. SSDs are more reliable than HDDs, Backblaze says, as they show a lower AFR rate (0.98%) compared to HDDs (1.64%).
The fact that the difference in reliability level isn't exactly staggering (0.66% AFR) is rather surprising, however, as SSDs are essentially just moving electrons through memory chips while hard drives have to deal with a complex (and failure-prone) mechanism employing spinning platters and extremely sensitive read/write magnetic heads.
The reasons behind failing drives aren't known, as only an SSD manufacturer would have the equipment needed to make a reliable diagnose. For 2022, Backblaze says that seven of the 13 drive models had no failure at all. Six of those seven models had a limited number of "drive days" (less than 10,000), the company concedes, meaning that there is not enough data to make a reliable projection about their failure rates.
An interesting tidbit about Backblaze's report is that the company hasn't used a single SSD unit made by Samsung, which is a major player in the SSD consumer market. One possible explanation is that Samsung drives aren't cheap, and Backblaze is essentially using the cheapest drives they can buy in bulk quantities.
The SSD Edition: 2022 Drive Stats Review:
Welcome to the 2022 SSD Edition of the Backblaze Drive Stats series. The SSD Edition focuses on the solid state drives (SSDs) we use as boot drives for the data storage servers in our cloud storage platform. This is opposed to our traditional Drive Stats reports which focus on our hard disk drives (HDDs) used to store customer data.
We started using SSDs as boot drives beginning in Q4 of 2018. Since that time, all new storage servers and any with failed HDD boot drives have had SSDs installed. Boot drives in our environment do much more than boot the storage servers. Each day they also read, write, and delete log files and temporary files produced by the storage server itself. The workload is similar across all the SSDs included in this report.
In this report, we look at the failure rates of the SSDs that we use in our storage servers for 2022, for the last 3 years, and for the lifetime of the SSDs. In addition, we take our first look at the temperature of our SSDs for 2022, and we compare SSD and HDD temperatures to see if SSDs really do run cooler.
As of December 31, 2022, there were 2,906 SSDs being used as boot drives in our storage servers. There were 13 different models in use, most of which are considered consumer grade SSDs, and we'll touch on why we use consumer grade SSDs a little later. In this report, we'll show the Annualized Failure Rate (AFR) for these drive models over various periods of time, making observations and providing caveats to help interpret the data presented.
The dataset on which this report is based is available for download on our Drive Stats Test Data webpage. The SSD data is combined with the HDD data in the same files. Unfortunately, the data itself does not distinguish between SSD and HDD drive types, so you have to use the model field to make that distinction. If you are just looking for SSD data, start with Q4 2018 and go forward.
Click on the link to get the actual figures.
Original Submission #1 Original Submission #2
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printed from SoylentNews, SSD Reliability is Only Slightly Better Than HDD, Backblaze Says on 2024-04-23 18:43:15