Storage provider Backblaze released its latest report today, and its findings will be useful, or at least interesting, for most PC users. The report looks at the failure rate of hard disk drives (HDDs) and compares them to much faster solid state drives (SSDs).

Most people who understand the basics of the two types of drives know that hard drives are mechanical media that rely on a spinning disk to read data. On the other hand, SSDs are based on NAND flash memory and have no moving parts in them. Therefore, the general consensus is that HDDs are less reliable than SSDs as moving parts are more likely to wear out.

Backblaze’s testing proves the anecdotal belief to be true, as comparisons of failure rates between the two types of drives show that SSDs are generally much more reliable. The firm explained the methodology by which the comparison was made:

All the SSDs and HDDs we report are bootable drives. They perform the same functions: loading storage servers, writing log files, acting as temporary storage for SMART statistics, etc. In other words, they perform the same tasks.

[..] To fairly compare SSDs and HDDs, we took into account the average age of the two groups, so SSDs averaged one year were compared to HDDs averaged one year, and so on.

The following charts show the annual failure rate (AFR) of SSDs and HDDs for 2021-2022:

As you can see above, the failure rate of older mechanical drives increases exponentially as they age. Meanwhile, AFR for SSDs seems to plateau after about four to five years of use. Source