New knowledge tracks failure charges of 13 SSD fashions, going again as much as 4 years

Backblaze, a San Mateo, California-based backup and cloud storage agency, on Thursday shared knowledge giving us a singular take 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 firstly of This autumn 2018.

Backblaze has lengthy shared knowledge on the reliability of laborious disk drives (HDDs), however this newest report supplies contemporary perspective on HDDs’ speedier, pricier cousins. As detailed by Backblaze’s weblog submit, 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 necessary to notice the restricted pattern measurement 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 supplies a broad glimpse at SSD reliability that the typical particular person cannot replicate on their very own.

Backblaze’s weblog supplies a number of tables depicting SSD failure charges, however this one appears at AFRs throughout the complete time Backblaze has used SSDs. The corporate began utilizing SSDs in 2018 however added many of the drives within the desk beneath inside the previous three years.

The best AFR (7.31 p.c) 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 at the least 100,000 lively days, the very 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 massive confidence intervals within the desk brought on by the restricted drive days for these SSDs.

“As we accumulate extra knowledge, these confidence intervals ought to change into extra correct,” the weblog mentioned.

Backblaze mentioned it prefers analyzing fashions with a 1 p.c or much less confidence interval, which leaves us with two consumer-grade Seagate drives, the ZA250CM10003 with a 0.66 p.c AFR and ZA250CM10002 with a 0.96 p.c 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, laborious for customers 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 very best AFR in 2022 was Seagate’s 250GB ZA250CM10002 at 1.98 p.c. 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 knowledge to make a dependable projection concerning the failure charges of these drive fashions.”

In addition to the Dell, which customers would wrestle to seek out, knowledge for the Seagate BarraCuda 120 SSD ZA250CM10003 and BarraCuda SSD ZA250CM10002 and Essential’s CT250MX500SSD1 are essentially the most useful, since they function at the least 100,000 lively days. Amongst these drives, the Seagate ZA250CM10003 confirmed the bottom AFR, 0.73 p.c.

Taking a step again additional, Backblaze additionally shared 2020, 2021, and 2022 knowledge for its SSDs, together with 4 fashions Backblaze added final yr.

You could discover a excessive AFR from the Essential 250GB CT250MX500SSD1, however observe that Backblaze solely added the drive in 2021, and it “recovered properly in 2022 after having a few early failures in 2021,” in response to Backblaze, which expects that pattern to proceed. The Essential SSDs’ early failures coincide with the tub curve, which expects machine 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 latest knowledge offers 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 by their paces, the extra perception it will likely be capable of present about SSD reliability.

Backblaze’s full dataset is on the market on its Onerous Drive Take a look at Knowledge web page.