If you needed another reason to get one of the best SSDs rather than any hard drive, here’s one. Blackblaze, an online backup storage company, published a study showing that SSDs having a far lower failure rate than traditional hard drives. (HDDs). This data was taken from the servers in thousands of Blackblaze’s data center servers over the past several years.
Blackblaze has been analyzing the reliability of its hard drives for years and has detailed graphics of which hard drives from WDC, Toshiba, Seagate and HGST are the most reliable and which ones are more prone to failures. But, this is the first time Blackblaze has started analyzing SSDs as well.
Keep in mind that the average age of the SSDs Backblaze uses is only 12.7 months old, whereas the average age of its hard drives is 4x older, 49.6 months to be precise. Also, Blackblaze uses SSDs as boot drives alone in its servers, so these SSDs could also have less of a workload compared to the actual hard drives where are constantly being used to backup client data.
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Counting the annual failure rates of Blackblazes drives; all of the company’s hard drives netted a failure rate of 10.56%, meanwhile, all SSDs netted just 0.58% in failure rates.
The excellent reliability of SSDs becomes even more apparent in the lifetime graph, where SSDs failure rates were just 0.65%. HDD failure rates were lower at 6.04%, but still not close to solid-state drives.
For hard drive model comparisons, Blackblaze shared with us a chart of all the hard drive models actively used in its servers. These range from HGST drives, to Seagate, Toshiba, and a couple of WDC drives.
Most notable are the Toshiba, Seagate, and WDC 16TB drives which so far have zero recorded losses. Some of HGST’s 12TB and 4TB models also record extremely low losses of just 0.33% on average.
Meanwhile, some of the least reliable drives are from Seagate alone, some of its 10TB, 12TB, 14TB and 4TB model’s have record failure rates well above 1%, with the 10TB model and 14TB model been even worse with over a 2% failure rate.
For more details on Blackblaze’s hard drive analytics, check out the company’s latest report.