Cloud storage firm Backblaze has introduced (opens in new tab) its newest spherical of figures monitoring SSD reliability, they usually make fairly good studying for a lot of customers.

For storing prospects’ information, the corporate nonetheless makes use of HDDs with giant capacities, but it surely has been utilizing SSDs related to greater speeds for the reason that finish of 2018 as boot drives, which implies we now have a number of years’ information about how properly they carry out in actual life.

By December 31, 2022, Backblaze had 2,906 SSDs on its books unfold throughout 13 completely different fashions, most of which, it says, are thought-about consumer-grade thus they’d equally be at house in your personal PC.

Are SSDs dependable?

As a part of the checks, Backblaze compares its SSDs from Essential, Dell, Micron, Seagate, and WDC, measuring between 240GB and a couple of,000GB, although it’s price noting that almost all of its information focuses on Seagate drives which make up nearly two-thirds (63%) of its SSDs by quantity, or over half (56%) by complete capability.

Every drive was awarded an Annualized Failure Charge (AFR) proportion, representing its chance of failure throughout a full 12 months of use. The figures point out that the batch of SSDs Backblaze at the moment makes use of has a mean AFR of 0.98%, having recorded a complete of 25 drive failures throughout a mixed 934,441 days.

In its report, it’s clear that Backblaze takes a cautious strategy to its figures. Although seven of the 13 drive varieties had no failures, six of these had been operating for fewer than 10,000 days which it says doesn’t present enough information to make a dependable projection.

Even so, this determine is down in contrast with the AFR of 2021, which stood at 1.05%. 

It’s additionally potential to extract some temperature-related steerage from the analysis, with SSDs operating hotter on common throughout the hotter summer season months, highlighting the necessity for correct care and a focus. An extra spike within the runup to Christmas additionally noticed temperatures rise, although the rationale for this isn’t clear.

The 2022 SSD AFR was considerably decrease than the 1.37% fee recorded in 2022 throughout a mixed 78 million days, and 230,000 drives, for HDDs. With this in thoughts, and SSD costs heading in a downward route, SSD adoption could quickly rise to new heights.

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