Wednesday, September 14th 2022
Backblaze Data Shows SSDs May In Fact be More Reliable Than HDDs
Cloud storage provider Backblaze is one of the industry players providing insightful reports into the health and reliability of the storage mediums they invest in to support their business. In its most recent report, the company shared data that may finally be pointing towards the general perception (and one of SSD's call to fame upon their introduction): that they boast of higher reliability and lower failure rates than HDDs.
The company's latest reports shows that SSDs have entered their fifth operating year without an escalation in failure rates: something that seems to plague HDDs pretty heavily starting from year 4. The idea is simple: SSDs should be more reliable because there are no moving part (no platters and no read/write heads that can fail). However, SSDs do have other points of failure, such as NAND itself (the reason there's TBW ratings) or its controller. Backblaze's data does however show that those concerns may be overrated. Of course, there's a chance that SSDs employed by Backblaze will hit a "reliability" wall of the sort that HDDs seem to enter in year four of their operation, where failure rates increase immensely. More data throughout a larger span of time will be welcome, but for now, it does seem that SSDs are the best way for users to keep their data available.
In other news, a recent study called to question the environmental friendliness of SSDs as compared to their HDD counterparts, claiming that SSDs actually imposed a steeper environmental cost than HDDs. But not all may be exactly what it seems in that front.
Source:
via TechSpot
The company's latest reports shows that SSDs have entered their fifth operating year without an escalation in failure rates: something that seems to plague HDDs pretty heavily starting from year 4. The idea is simple: SSDs should be more reliable because there are no moving part (no platters and no read/write heads that can fail). However, SSDs do have other points of failure, such as NAND itself (the reason there's TBW ratings) or its controller. Backblaze's data does however show that those concerns may be overrated. Of course, there's a chance that SSDs employed by Backblaze will hit a "reliability" wall of the sort that HDDs seem to enter in year four of their operation, where failure rates increase immensely. More data throughout a larger span of time will be welcome, but for now, it does seem that SSDs are the best way for users to keep their data available.
20 Comments on Backblaze Data Shows SSDs May In Fact be More Reliable Than HDDs
:roll:
In fact, from data security standpoint, that's a plus.
On the other hand, issues like controller quirks were not quite as ironed out as they are now.
Lower individual write cycle counts are also compensated by higher capacity, since controller has more free space to perform wear-levelling on.
techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead/
How many “real” years that would be who knows. Possibly 20 depending how much you use the drive??
Correct me if I'm wrong but the current SSDs have many more parts susceptible to failure, such as arm chips, controllers, Ram etc...
I prefer drive makers with their own flash, but you can still get decent lifetimes from larger re branders like seagate, Inland and Kingston.
Anecdotally, I have powered on an old 240GB Kingston SSD that was idle for 4 years and it had no issues with the data on it.
Edit: shfs37a240g if you care about the exact model I had
I had SSD failures myself, and see them all day long as I work in service business. Most death percent comes from laptops, where a wild zoo of drives is being used, but the damage cause is mechanical failure, as laptops are carried around, bent, abused, and shit thermals... as everyone wants thin lappies... thin melting hot lappies that throttle even using youtube.
So all things considered. We all agree that this chart is not apples and oranges... but apples and shoelaces. There are vastly different points. Consumer drives vs enterprise ie how much space is reserved for reallocation and how well cooled they are. MLC/SLC versus new gen multibits. Controller failures are a different topic. They even can't be compared and make a claim SSD may be more reliable. They are the same in my point it just depends how you use them, you can manage to kill either of those.
In the end... the topic about RAID emerged. Not sure how ZFS is tailored towards NAND if actually and does it support TRIM and manage data rot, it is more tailored towards spinners . I haven't looked into it but in general RAIDing SSD's is a bad idea for consumers, especially in RAID0(leave aside enterprise). You make them work worse as you kill the access time and 4K and 4K mulithread performance. Linear writes do not matter, quit the epeen stuff about it.
Good idea is to do Hybrid raid. BTRFS actually does native support of RAID1 with SSD and HDD. It will do the job on the SSD later syncing up a mirror to the spinner. Doing Snapshots is a decent and mature plan B without any RAID magic. But BTRFS RAID is still in beta stage as such, so you have to read and experiment.
I will say it again.
BACKUP IS YOUR ONLY FRIEND. The better, backup of your backup is your next best friend. I have a files on my workstation, I backup it fast on NAS SSD's and is is later mirrored once more to my two spinners in RAID1 also, then I kinda feel safe about my data.
2. Occasional clones to cold storage drives that are only hot during the actual cloning.
There is no point to running an SSD in RAID 0 unless you have some very very specific justifiable reasons to do so.
There is no reason to not run your SSD in RAID 1 unless you really don't care about the data or just occasionally clone to an external drive.
By external I mean not a "commercial external" drive, I mean an internal drive that you don't have physically hooked up to anything as a back up drive.
I've been using Paragon Hard Disk Manager for years now. I clone both full disk-to-disk and individual partitions (e.g. 1TB C:\ and 1TB D:\) to an external 4TB. It's worth the money to buy a program like Paragon Hard Disk Manager, the built-in drive tools for Windows just suck. It takes days to setup my computer if I do it from scratch, less than an hour via a clone. Even better, I can clone from a smaller-to-larger drive and a larger-to-smaller drive setup. Obviously when cloning a larger drive to a smaller drive the data needs to not exceed what the smaller drive uses. The program intelligently readusts the subjective sizes of partitions so that the data partition always uses up the available space (by default) though you can adjust it before making the commit. I have zero complaints and having good software has saved me countless hours of aggravation in addition to the multiple RAID 1s I run.