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Cloud storage company Backblaze has announced (opens in new tab) monitoring its latest round of grades SSD reliability, and they are quite easy to read for many users.
For storing customer data, the company still uses large capacity HDDs, but since the end of 2018 it has been using SSDs with higher speeds as boot drives, which means we now have data over several years on how well they perform in real life.
As of December 31, 2022, Backblaze had 2,906 SSDs on its books, across 13 different models, most of which, it says, are considered consumer-grade, so they’d be equally at home on your own PC.
Are SSDs reliable?
As part of its testing, Backblaze compares its SSDs from Crucial, Dell, Micron, Seagate, and WDC, which measure between 240GB and 2,000GB, though it’s worth noting that the majority of the data focuses on Seagate drives that make up nearly two-thirds ( 63%) of its SSDs by number, or more than half (56%) by total capacity.
Each drive was assigned an AFR (Annualized Failure Rate) percentage, which represents the probability of failure over a full year of use. The numbers indicate that the batch of SSDs Backblaze is currently using has an average AFR of 0.98%, with a total of 25 drive failures over a combined 934,441 days.
The report makes it clear that Backblaze is careful with its numbers. While seven of the 13 drive types did not fail, six of them ran for less than 10,000 days, which they say does not provide enough data to make a reliable forecast.
Still, this figure is lower than the 2021 AFR, which was 1.05%.
It’s also possible to take some temperature-related guidance from the study, with SSDs getting hotter on average during the hotter summer months, highlighting the need for proper care and attention. A further spike in the run-up to Christmas also caused temperatures to rise, although the reason for this is not clear.
The 2022 SSD AFR was significantly lower than the 1.37% recorded in 2022 over a combined 78 million days and 230,000 drives, for HDDs. With this in mind, and SSD prices moving in a downward direction, SSD adoption could soon soar to new heights.
