Backblaze: SSDs Fail Slightly Less Than HDDs
Blocks & Files, March 10th, 2023
Cloud storage provider Backblaze has found its SSD annual failure rate was 0.98 percent compared to 1.64 percent for disk drives, a difference of 0.66 percentage points. It also noted that SSD manufacturers' SMART stats were not so smart.
Backblaze stores customers' backup and general storage data in its cloud datacenters. These are composed of disk drive pods and servers that use SSD boot drives. It has published disk drive annual failure rate statistics for some years and has now accumulated enough SSD data to publish SSD AFR numbers for the first time.
The surprise is that SSDs are not much more reliable than disk drives with their mechanical components - the moving read:write heads and spinning platters.