A few weeks ago we were interested in the lifespan of SSD drives and today we have new data that confirms their high reliability, higher than hard drives according to the BackBlaze tests, the conclusions of which were published by our colleagues at MCPRO.

BackBlaze is a cloud storage company that uses nearly 100,000 storage units in its data center, working in chunks (24/7) and adding millions of operational hours. Using the error rate of your own infrastructure is a good barometer to assess the situation.

If until now its annual reports have focused on hard drives, a few months ago it published the first report on the reliability of hard drives after introducing them to the infrastructure in 2018. It should be noted that its SSD installed base is still very small compared to hard drives and not enough time has passed for the drives to wear out. In any case, the first tests confirm: SSDs have fewer failures than hard drives.

SSD reliability and lifespan

The SSD reliability debate started a decade ago when some product lines had performance issues. Today there is no doubt. SSDs are more reliable than hard drives, which they completely replaced in the client storage segment. And they intend to do the same on servers and data centers.

Recall that SSDs are based on NAND flash memories and have no moving parts, which gives them a huge advantage (in almost all sections) over hard disk mechanisms. But nothing lasts forever, and these drives, like any electronic product that uses flash memory to store information, have a limited lifespan simply by design.

Memory cell wear and tear is something inherent to this technology and to successive writes individual memory cells erode both capacity and performance. For this reason, SSDs contain additional free memory cells so that they do not lose storage capacity when the first ones fail. Plus, they automatically redistribute bad sectors so you don’t lose data or performance.

Due to their design, SSDs are more sensitive than hard drives potential power outages while they are running, and as we explained, memory blocks have a limited number of write operations before they fail.

On average, the industry receives about 700 TB of data written to a consumer disk before problems begin. It’s a huge amount that the vast majority of users can’t reach, and the manufacturers include a 5-year warranty on them.

Let’s summarize what we already knew

SSDs don’t last forever due to memory cell wear, but the extra cells that serve as replacements, high data write support, warranty and mean time between failures ensure a good number of years of use. In more numbers and with fewer errors than hard drives.