Backblaze, a company engaged in the cloud storage and backup industry, recently back to talk from SSD and, above all, of theirs reliability compared to hard drives. Of course, the one analyzed by the company is a targeted and specific use case, but still an interesting study and which, above all, comes after some preliminary assessments released in May. Has anything changed since then? Let’s find out.
The US company use both SSDs and HDDs as boot drives in storage servers. “Describing these solutions as boot drives is a misnomer as they are also used to store log files for system access, diagnostics, and more. In other words, these boot drives they regularly read, write and delete files in addition to the function of starting the server“.
Integration of SSDs into Backblaze’s storage structure began in mid-2018. “In our first storage servers, we used hard drives as boot drives as they were cheap and served their purpose. We continued until mid-2018 when we were able to buy 200GB SSDs for around $ 50, ours. maximum price for each storage server’s boot drives It was an experiment, but things worked out so well that starting in mid-2018 we started using only SSDs in new servers and replaced failed boot hard drives with SSDs“.
Thanks to the history of the hard disks and the new data obtained with the SSDs, the Backblaze technicians were able to compare the failure rates of the two storage technologies operating in the same work environment and with the same loads. The data, apparently, they seem to show a win for SSDs, but there is a to: the average age and days of operation clearly disadvantage hard disks.
The average age of an SSD is 14.2 months, while that of a hard disk stands at 52.4 months. In parallel, older SSDs are 33 months old, while younger hard drives reach 27 months. HDDs are, on average, three years older than SSDs, which places products at “very different points in their lifecycle”, Backblaze points out.
So, for a more accurate comparison, Backblaze went to fish historical hard disk data (back to Q4 2016) to make coincide or nearly the average age and days of operation with those of the SSD. There difference in the annualized failure rate (AFR) yes immediately reduced, showing that between SSD and HDD there is not the gap that was thought. And even looking at historical data, the two curves don’t look very different.
Backblaze therefore believes using the failure rate to choose between SSD and hard drive is questionable and that the choice should be guided more by cost, speed required, consumption, form factor and so on.
The clearly valid consideration for the specific use case, in the choice of a consumer who has to upgrade their PC or laptop, there are many other aspects including speed, prices and desired storage capacity. In the case of a laptop then, clearly an SSD having no moving parts much more resistant to shocks.
However, the proposed analysis allows us to see how hundreds if not thousands of storage units behave over time, adding a piece to the knowledge of how the two storage technologies behave. As this is a constantly evolving study, it will be interesting to follow any future developments to see if there will be any significant changes compared to the data collected so far.
.