Backblaze questioned whether SSDs are more reliable than hard drives last year, and now, a seemingly solid answer has come in the form of new data that the popular backup company released this week that illustrates how the technologies might fare as boot devices over time. Comprising five years of data, Backblaze’s charts indicate that SSDs are likely to fail at a much lower rate than HDDs over the long haul.
From a Backblaze report:
[…] we can reasonably claim that SSDs are more reliable than HDDs, at least when used as boot drives in our environment. This supports the anecdotal stories and educated guesses made by our readers over the past year or so. Well done.
We’ll continue to collect and present the SSD data on a regular basis to confirm these findings and see what’s next. It is highly certain that the failure rate of SSDs will eventually start to rise. It is also possible that at some point the SSDs could hit the wall, perhaps when they start to reach their media wearout limits. To that point, over the coming months we’ll take a look at the SMART stats for our SSDs and see how they relate to drive failure. We also have some anecdotal information of our own that we’ll try to confirm on how far past the media wearout limits you can push an SSD. Stay tuned.
The data that Backblaze collected and analyzed for its review is available on its Hard Drive Test Data page. Backblaze is best known for its cloud storage and data backup services, which include a personal backup plan that offers unlimited backup for $7/month.