Drive Failure
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SSDs Failing Almost as Often as Hard Drives
Cloud Storage company Backblaze has published new data showing its SSD failure rates are almost as high as hard disk drives (HDDs). In a recent blog post, Backblaze explained its drive analysis for both SSDs and HDDs, which revolves around real-world use in a live environment. The company uses SMART stats to check drive health. Backblaze says it doesn't know why its SSDs have such a high failure rate at this time.
To analyze drive failures, Backblaze defines a drive failure as both a complete failure, or a drive failure that is imminent. To predict the latter, Backblaze uses the drives' internal SMART stats, recording read error rate, SSD wear leveling, power-on hours, program fail count total, and more.
To make the analysis more useful, Backblaze has only analyzed boot drives in its storage servers, instead of the main storage drives. Boot drives receive near-constant use from starting up the server to reading, writing, and deleting files, resulting in very little idle time.
Since 2018, Backblaze has used a combination of both SSDs and hard disk drives for boot drives in its servers, making the company the perfect candidate for this kind of testing...
After taking into account drive age and equalizing it between SSDs and HDDs, we can see that the results have changed significantly. SSDs aren't that far behind hard drives in failure rate, with a 1.05% annualized failure rate compared to 1.38%.
Backblaze doesn't know why SSDs are falling so much, but the data definitely shows that SSDs aren't nearly as resilient as we once thought -- and to clarify, these SSDs are fully failing, not from maxing out the drive's write endurance, but from just from general use.
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Just thinking about it, of the dozens and dozens of spinning-platter hard drives I've had since 1992, I think I've had 2-3 die of a hardware failure. Software issues, sure, but nothing a reformat wouldn't fix.
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Just thinking about it, of the dozens and dozens of spinning-platter hard drives I've had since 1992, I think I've had 2-3 die of a hardware failure. Software issues, sure, but nothing a reformat wouldn't fix.
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@george-k said in Drive Failure:
I think I've had 2-3 die of a hardware failure. Software issues, sure, but nothing a reformat wouldn't fix.
Hu? Software problem or hardware problem - which one was it?
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I just bit the bullet and did cloud storage. I don't like the privacy implications... but my life isn't that interesting either.
@xenon said in Drive Failure:
I just bit the bullet and did cloud storage. I don't like the privacy implications... but my life isn't that interesting either.
Who did you go with?
Mac Fanboi that I am, I'm using iCloud.
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@xenon said in Drive Failure:
I just bit the bullet and did cloud storage. I don't like the privacy implications... but my life isn't that interesting either.
Who did you go with?
Mac Fanboi that I am, I'm using iCloud.
@george-k said in Drive Failure:
@xenon said in Drive Failure:
I just bit the bullet and did cloud storage. I don't like the privacy implications... but my life isn't that interesting either.
Who did you go with?
Mac Fanboi that I am, I'm using iCloud.
Embarrassingly, I'm paying for both right now. We were on Google Photos, then I decided to switch to Mac because we're on iphones.
But I've been reluctant to sever the google photos connection because we like their interface better, it has genuinely good picture searching features (which is creepy) and I have a lot of my stuff in google drive.
I dunno - haven't made a decision yet.
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@xenon said in Drive Failure:
I just bit the bullet and did cloud storage. I don't like the privacy implications... but my life isn't that interesting either.
Who did you go with?
Mac Fanboi that I am, I'm using iCloud.
@george-k said in Drive Failure:
@xenon said in Drive Failure:
I just bit the bullet and did cloud storage. I don't like the privacy implications... but my life isn't that interesting either.
Who did you go with?
Mac Fanboi that I am, I'm using iCloud.
I use One Drive mostly now... seems to be clear (and easy) to see what has synced, what has been stored locally, etc.
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interesting. I would have thought SSD would be much better. I do not use cloud yet. Back everything up to a hard drive.
