Backblaze began using SSDs in its repositories in Q4 2018, and as of June 30, 2023, there were 3,144 SSDs on its servers, according to the report.

The table provided by the service provider that the relevant SSD brands are mainly Seagate, with Western Digital, Dell, Arrowhead, and Micron products remaining; the storage capacity of a single SSD is mostly 250 GB, but there are also products deploying 500 GB and 2 TB.

▲ image source Backblaze

▲ Image courtesy of Backblaze

Backblaze says the reason Seagate’s model SSDSCKKB240GZR has an annual failure rate of more than 800% is because only two drives were deployed in Q1 2023, and one of them failed shortly after installation. This is why the annual failure rate is so high.

In addition, the vendor claims that any given data can be unstable and is therefore for reference only.

Factors such as the age of the hard disk and random failures can cause the annual failure rate to fluctuate. The annual failure rate for the first quarter was 0.95%, and for the second quarter it was 1.05%. Backblaze also included a chart showing the quarterly failure rate information.

▲ Image courtesy of Backblaze

▲ Image courtesy of Backblaze

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Backblaze officials said that the sample size is not enough to reflect the real situation, the relevant conclusions are only based on the existing data.

Backblaze began using SSDs in its repositories in Q4 2018 and ended 2021 with 2,200; 2022 with 2,558; and June 30, 2023 with 3,144 SSDs on its servers.

Backblaze says that in real-world usage scenarios, the hard disks are not just loaded with storage services, but also store log files and temporary storage server files. Depending on server activity, the boot disk reads, writes, and deletes files every day, among other things.

The data also excludes certain outliers, such as Seagate’s 240GB model SSDSCKKB240GZR, which has an average annual failure rate (AFR) of 829.55%, with two units of this model at the beginning of the year, but one failed shortly after installation. The other models continue to run at full power, which means they have an AFR of 0%, which doesn’t make any sense either.

The company says that representative statistics will be based on a sample of at least 100 SSDs running for 10,000 days. However, you’ll notice that SSDs have an annual failure rate of about 1%, while HDDs have an annual failure rate of over 2%.

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Backblaze recently counted 245,757 mechanical hard drives and solid state drives used in its global data centers, 4,460 for the boot disk, of which 3,144 are SSDs and 1,316 are HDDs.

Backblaze said it monitored 241,297 hard drives in its data centers through the end of Q2 2023.

After excluding 357 drives used for testing and some models with single-digit sample sizes, a total of 240,940 drives were counted in the table and categorized into 31 model groups to provide annual failure rate (AFR) data.

Six drive models performed perfectly in Q2 2023, but three of them were too few to be statistically significant.

The oldest working storage drive in the Backblaze lineup is the 4 TB Seagate ST 4000 DM 000, which lasted 105.2 months (8.8 years) without a failure, but the oldest working hard drive winner is the 500 GB Lifetime WDC WD 5000 BPKT boot drive at 122 months (10.2 years).

The AFR was 1.54% in Q1 and rose to 2.28% in Q2. Of course, quarterly AFRs can fluctuate, but they can also reflect trends that are worth examining further.

Broken down by capacity, the report shows that 8TB and 10TB models have the highest failure rates.

A link to the report, interested users can read in-depth.

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Source: Candra DP

Most of the SSDs used by Backblaze is not the latest M.2 NVMe models. Since these SSDs are primarily boot disks, most are only 250GB in capacity, a third of the models are 500GB, and 2TB models are available in just three.

The report shows that there are 7 SSD models with zero failure rate, but only one model of Dell DELLBOSS VD has a relatively large sample size, with a total of 411 pieces. The sample size of the other 6 SSD models with zero failure rate is a bit small, among which there are only 2 pieces of the thin Seagate 500GB ZA500GM10001. Taken together, the average failure rate for 2906 SSDs is 0.98%.

The post Backblaze Announces FY2022 SSD Failure Rate: Less Than 1% appeared first on TechGoing.

Cloud backup and storage provider Backblaze has launched its SSD report for the second quarter of 2022, reporting that SSDs are more reliable than mechanical drives, at least for the tens of thousands of drives deployed in its data centers, but the company also said that could change in the future as SSDs age.

Both Backblaze’s SSDs and HDDs are reportedly used as boot drives, not disks for storing data, and Backblaze began switching to SSDs in the fourth quarter of 2018, which means the two sets of drives are at different points on their respective life curves, for which the company only compared SSDs with an average age of one year to HDDs with an average age of one year, and so on.

The latest year of data shows a downward trend in SSD failure rates.

Backblaze SSD vs. HDD failure rates

Andy Klein, the chief cloud storage evangelist at Backblaze, said, “We can now reasonably claim that SSDs are more reliable than HDDs, at least when used as boot drives in our environment.”

He warns, however, that there is a “high probability” that SSD failure rates will eventually start to pick up, and it’s possible that at some point, SSDs used by Backblaze may “hit a plateau,” perhaps when they start to reach their flash wear limits. when they start to reach their flash wear limits.

The chart shows that from 2018 through 2021, the first year has the lowest failure rates for both types of drives, with HDDs failing at less than 0.66% and SSDs not failing at all. The second year is almost exactly the same linear increase, with HDD and SSD failure rates increasing by roughly 0.85%. The linear increase in failure rate is also true in years three and four, with both SSDs and HDDs showing the same failure rate curve, although SSDs have a lower overall failure rate. In the fourth year, HDDs hovered around 1.8%, while SSDs barely exceeded 1%.

Then things changed. In year 5 HDD failure rates rose dramatically, jumping from less than 2% to 3.6% in one year. Meanwhile, SSDs went in the opposite direction, dropping from 1.05% to 0.92%, meaning that SSDs were three times more reliable than HDDs.

It has been argued that SSDs have no moving parts and are therefore necessarily more reliable than mechanical drives, with the exception of fatal SSD failures due to overwriting or poorly designed firmware and mastering, which only affect a small percentage of people.

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