Backblaze, a San Mateo, California-based backup and cloud storage agency, on Thursday shared information giving us a singular have a look at the reliability of SSDs over as much as 4 years of use. Wanting on the 2,906 SSDs in its possession, the corporate tracked the failure charges of largely consumer-grade SSDs, which it began utilizing as boot drives at the beginning of This fall 2018.
Backblaze has lengthy shared information on the reliability of hard disk drives (HDDs), however this newest report offers recent perspective on HDDs’ speedier, pricier cousins. As detailed by Backblaze’s blog post, the corporate makes use of SSDs for booting storage servers, in addition to studying, writing, and deleting log and short-term recordsdata made by mentioned storage servers. Backblaze mentioned all SSDs analyzed have “comparable” workloads.
Earlier than we get into Backblaze’s first desk, which depicts annualized failure charges (AFRs) for 13 completely different SSDs fashions, it is essential to notice the restricted pattern dimension of two,906 drives and differing variety of drives for every mannequin. Some drives have seen far more lively use than others, with lively days starting from 104 days as much as 724,240. So whereas these aren’t apples-to-apples comparisons of SSD fashions, the desk offers a broad glimpse at SSD reliability that the typical particular person cannot replicate on their very own.
Backblaze’s weblog offers a number of tables depicting SSD failure charges, however this one seems to be at AFRs throughout all the time Backblaze has used SSDs. The corporate began utilizing SSDs in 2018 however added many of the drives within the desk under throughout the previous three years.
The best AFR (7.31 %) comes from a 2TB Seagate drive, however that drive additionally has solely been in motion for 4,996 days. When taking a look at drives with no less than 100,000 lively days, the best AFR comes from the only real Essential drive. However, once more, all of those drives have completely different drive counts and days of use.
Backblaze’s weblog additionally highlighted the big confidence intervals within the desk brought on by the restricted drive days for these SSDs.
“As we accumulate extra information, these confidence intervals ought to turn into extra correct,” the weblog mentioned.
Backblaze mentioned it prefers analyzing fashions with a 1 % or much less confidence interval, which leaves us with two consumer-grade Seagate drives, the ZA250CM10003 with a 0.66 % AFR and ZA250CM10002 with a 0.96 % AFR. Knowledge for the Dell drive (no failures) additionally meets Backblaze’s confidence interval requirements, however the firm says this is among the few enterprise drives in its dataset and, thus, exhausting for shoppers to get. Dell’s Boot Optimized Storage Answer VD is an M.2 drive mounted onto a PCIe card for server deployments.
As you’ll be able to see above, the drive with the best AFR in 2022 was Seagate’s 250GB ZA250CM10002 at 1.98 %. The SSD mannequin had one of many largest variety of drive days, and with 554 drives in rely, it is the second most plentiful SSD in Backblaze’s stock.
Seven SSDs within the desk above noticed zero failures in 2022. Backblaze famous, although, that six of these solely had 10,000 drive days, so “there may be not sufficient information to make a dependable projection in regards to the failure charges of these drive fashions.”
Apart from the Dell, which shoppers would wrestle to search out, information for the Seagate BarraCuda 120 SSD ZA250CM10003 and BarraCuda SSD ZA250CM10002 and Essential’s CT250MX500SSD1 are essentially the most useful, since they characteristic no less than 100,000 lively days. Amongst these drives, the Seagate ZA250CM10003 confirmed the bottom AFR, 0.73 %.
Taking a step again additional, Backblaze additionally shared 2020, 2021, and 2022 information for its SSDs, together with 4 fashions Backblaze added final yr.
It’s possible you’ll discover a excessive AFR from the Essential 250GB CT250MX500SSD1, however notice that Backblaze solely added the drive in 2021, and it “recovered properly in 2022 after having a few early failures in 2021,” based on Backblaze, which expects that development to proceed. The Essential SSDs’ early failures coincide with the tub curve, which expects system failures to happen early within the launch cycle earlier than dropping to a steady price after which rising because the product ages.
Backblaze additionally highlighted differing AFRs from the 250GB Seagate ZA250CM10003 and 250GB Seagate ZA250CM10002.
“The Seagate drive (mannequin: ZA250CM10003) has delivered a sub-1% AFR over all three years. Whereas the AFR for the Seagate drive (mannequin: ZA250CM10002) slipped in 2022 to almost 2%. Mannequin ZA250CM10003 is the newer mannequin of the 2 by a few yr. There’s little distinction in any other case besides the ZA250CM10003 makes use of much less idle energy, 116mW versus 185mW for the ZA250CM10002. Will probably be attention-grabbing to see how the youthful mannequin fares over the subsequent yr,” the weblog mentioned.
Backblaze has beforehand proven the reliability of SSDs over HDDs throughout a five-year interval, however this current information provides us a model-by-model breakdown of AFRs of SSDs in its arsenal throughout a barely longer time interval. The longer Backblaze has these SSDs and places them via their paces, the extra perception it is going to be in a position to present about SSD reliability.
Backblaze’s full dataset is accessible on its Hard Drive Test Data web page.
