Backblaze Annual Failure Rates for SSDs in 2022: Less than One Percent

Cloud storage supplier Backblaze published the statistics (opens in new tab) for two,906 SSDs used as boot drives in storage servers. To be clear, these will not be Solely As a result of boot drives learn and write log recordsdata and non permanent recordsdata on the similar time, the previous can generally take fairly a bit of damage and tear. Backblaze began utilizing SSDs for boot drives from 2018, and it is one of many few methods to get quite a lot of perception into how lengthy massive volumes of largely shopper drives final over time, reminiscent of arduous drive statistics.

Earlier than we transfer on to statistics, there are some {qualifications}. First, a lot of the SSDs Backblaze makes use of will not be the most recent M.2 NVMe fashions. Additionally, whereas most drives solely supply 250GB of storage, plus a couple of third of them 500GB and solely three supply the bigger 2TB, their capacities are sometimes fairly small as properly. Nevertheless, utilizing a lot of the identical {hardware} mannequin simplifies issues in terms of {hardware} administration. Anyway, if you happen to’re hoping to see statistics on well-liked drives that might make it into our greatest SSDs record, you may be dissatisfied.

Listed here are the statistics for the final 12 months.

Whereas seven of the drive fashions used had zero errors, solely one among them had a big variety of put in drivers: Dell DELLBOSS VD (Boot Optimized Storage Resolution). The opposite six have fewer than 40 SSDs in use, and 4 are put in on solely two or three servers. It is extra useful to concentrate to drivers with quite a lot of utilization, particularly these with greater than 100,000 driving days.

These include Essential MX500 250GB, Seagate BarraCuda SSD and SSD 120 and Dell BOSS. Common age of Essential MX500 (opens in new tab) Though the MX500 was first launched in early 2018, the drives are solely seven months outdated. It is clear that Backblaze isn’t an early adopter of the most recent SSDs. Nonetheless, the annual failure fee of boot SSDs on the whole is lower than 1%.

Going again to a fair longer view of the final three years, solely 46 whole disk failures stay on this timeframe, with a 1% annual failure fee. Backblaze additionally states that after two comparatively fast failures in 2021, the MX500 carried out significantly better in 2022. Seagate’s legacy ZA250CM10002 additionally dropped a 2% failure fee final 12 months, whereas the brand new ZA250CM10003 had longer uptime and fewer failures; It might be fascinating to see if these tendencies proceed.

One other piece of information Backblaze appears at is SSD temperature, as reported by SMART (Dell BOSS would not appear to assist this). The graph isn’t zero-based, so at first look it might look like there’s a honest quantity of fluctuation, however in actuality the drivers averaged between 34.4C and 35.4C – solely the 1C vary.

In fact that is simply the typical and there are some outliers. There have been 4 observations of a 20C trip and one instance of a 61C trip, most within the 25-42C vary. It will be good if the bell curve seen above was in some way additionally related to unhealthy drivers, however with solely 25 whole breakdowns over the 12 months, that would not occur – Backblaze known as the ensuing plot “ridiculous”.

Consequently, the variety of SSDs utilized by Backblaze pales compared to the variety of arduous drives — verify the most recent Backblaze HDD report (opens in new tab)for instance, the place greater than 290,000 drivers had been in use final 12 months. It’s because no buyer information is saved on SSDs, so they’re just for the working system, non permanent recordsdata, and logs. Nonetheless, the information from round 3,000 drives is way over any of us (aside from IT employees) can entry in a 12 months. The HDDs coincidentally had an AFR of 1.37%.

Does this show that SSDs are extra dependable than HDDs? Probably not, and having a superb backup technique remains to be essential. Hopefully, we’ll see newer M.2 SSDs make their method into Backblaze’s information within the coming years — for instance, we would prefer to see possibly 100 or so every of some PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0 drives, however after all assuming these storage servers even assist these interfaces. Given time, they nearly actually will.