SSD Reliability: Only slightly better than HDDs

Every year, the Californian company Backblaze provides data on the reliability of mass storage used in the cloud and data backup service provider’s five data centers worldwide. The US backup provider operates the solid-state mass storage devices as boot drives, log files or temporary data, thereby ensuring constant utilization of the flash memory media used.

Since Backblaze mostly uses consumer SSDs, the statistics also provide exciting insights for PC do-it-yourself enthusiasts. The “2022 Drive Stats Review – SSD Edition” evaluates the data from 2,906 SSD boot drives, with a total of 13 different flash memory models being used. The backup company uses the annualized failure rate (AFR) to measure the reliability of the data storage. The lower this percentage, the lower the failure rate per year.

Comparison of drive reliability.
Source: Backblaze


According to this report, SSDs are indeed more reliable than HDDs: the annualized failure rate across all 13 SSD models is just 0.98%, compared to 1.64% for HDDs. What is surprising, however, is that the difference between these two values ​​is so small at 0.66%. Because classic hard disk drives have magnetic discs and read/write heads, while only electrons are moved back and forth in flash memories.

Of the 13 SSD models, seven ran at Backblaze in 2022 without a single failure. However, six of these seven SSDs had less than 10,000 “drive days”, which somewhat reduces the meaningfulness of the data. Solid state drives from Crucial, Dell, Micron, Seagate and Western Digital were used. Thus, no data on the well-known SSD provider Samsung is included in this report.

Source: backblaze via tech spot