Five years of data show that SSDs are more reliable than HDDs over the long haul

Enlarge / Crucial's venerable MX500 is one of the SSDs that Backblaze uses in its data centers. (credit: Crucial)

Backup and cloud storage company Backblaze has published data comparing the long-term reliability of solid-state storage drives and traditional spinning hard drives in its data center. Based on data collected since the company began using SSDs as boot drives in late 2018, Backblaze cloud storage evangelist Andy Klein published a report yesterday showing that the company's SSDs are failing at a much lower rate than its HDDs as the drives age.

Backblaze has published drive failure statistics (and related commentary) for years now; the hard drive-focused reports observe the behavior of tens of thousands of data storage and boot drives across most major manufacturers and are comprehensive enough that we can draw at least some conclusions about which companies make the most (and least) reliable drives.

The sample size for this SSD data is much smaller, both in the number and variety of drives tested—they're mostly 2.5-inch drives from Crucial, Seagate, and Dell, with little representation of Western Digital/SanDisk and no data from Samsung drives at all. This makes the data less useful for comparing relative reliability between companies, but it can still be useful for comparing the overall reliability of hard drives to the reliability of SSDs doing the same work.

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