Backblaze, a San Mateo, Calif.-based backup and cloud storage company, shared data on Thursday to provide a unique take on SSD reliability for up to four years of use. Looking at his 2,906 SSDs, the company tracked the failure rate of his mostly consumer-grade SSDs, which he began using as boot drives in early Q4 2018.
Backblaze has long shared data on hard disk drive (HDD) reliability, but this latest report offers a new perspective on HDD’s faster and more expensive cousins. As detailed in Backblaze’s blog post, the company uses his SSDs to boot storage servers, and to read, write, and delete logs and temporary files created by storage servers. Backblaze said all SSDs analyzed had “similar” workloads.
Before we get into Backblaze’s first table showing Annualized Failure Rates (AFR) for 13 SSD models, it’s important to note the limited sample size of 2,906 drives and the different number of drives per model. Some drives are used much more frequently than others, ranging from 104 days to 724,240 days. So, while these aren’t perfect comparisons of SSD models, this table gives a broad glimpse of his SSD’s reliability that the average person can’t replicate on their own.
The Backblaze blog provides several tables showing SSD failure rates, which look at the overall AFR while Backblaze uses the SSD. The company started using his SSD in 2018, but has added most of the drives in the table below within the last three years.
The highest AFR (7.31%) comes from a 2TB Seagate drive, which also only lasted 4,996 days. Looking at drives with more than 100,000 active days, only Crucial drives have the highest AFR. However, all of these drives vary in number of drives and days of use.
The Backblaze blog also highlights the large confidence intervals in the table due to the limited drive days of these SSDs.
“These confidence intervals should become more accurate as we accumulate more data,” the blog said.
Backblaze said he prefers to analyze models with confidence intervals of 1% or less. This leaves us with two consumer grade Seagate drives of his: the ZA250CM10003 with an AFR of 0.66% and the ZA250CM10002 with an AFR of 0.96%. Data from the Dell drive (no faults) also met Backblaze’s confidence interval criteria, but the company said it was one of the few enterprise drives in its dataset and difficult to obtain for consumers. I’m here. Dell’s Boot Optimized Storage Solution VD is an M.2 drive mounted on a PCIe card for server deployment.
As you can see from the chart above, the drive with the highest AFR in 2022 was Seagate’s 250GB ZA250CM10002 with 1.98%. The SSD model is one of the models with the highest number of drive days and has 554 drives, making it the second most abundant SSD in Backblaze’s inventory.
The 7 SSDs in the table above had zero failures in 2022. However, Backblaze says that six of them had only his 10,000 drive days, so “we don’t have enough data to make reliable predictions about the failure rates of these drive models.”
Seagate BarraCuda 120 SSD ZA250CM10003 and BarraCuda SSD ZA250CM10002 and Crucial’s CT250MX500SSD1 data are the most helpful, besides Dell, which consumers struggle to find. Among these drives, the Seagate ZA250CM10003 had the lowest AFR at 0.73%.
Taking a step back, Backblaze also shared 2020, 2021, and 2022 data for SSDs, including four models Backblaze added last year.
You might notice a higher AFR on the Crucial 250GB CT250MX500SSD1, but Backblaze only added more drives in 2021, and according to Backblaze, “after a few initial failures in 2021, we’ll have Please note that I recovered well. Continue. Crucial SSD early failures match the bathtub curve, which is expected to slow down to steady speed after device failure early in the release cycle and increase as the product ages.
Backblaze also highlighted a different AFR than the 250GB Seagate ZA250CM10003 and 250GB Seagate ZA250CM10002.
“The Seagate drive (model: ZA250CM10003) achieved an AFR of less than 1% over three years. Other than the lower idle power of 116mW for the ZA250CM10003 versus 185mW for the ZA250CM10002, there is little difference otherwise.
Backblaze has previously shown reliability of SSDs versus HDDs over a 5-year period, but this recent data shows a model-by-model breakdown of SSD AFR over a slightly longer period. The more Backblaze puts its paces to the test with these SSDs, the more insight we can provide into SSD reliability.
The full Backblaze dataset is available on the Hard Drive Test Data page.
