In the last quarter, we have already seen how the reliability of SSDs is catching up with that of hard drives, although there were some nuances to adjust, such as the number of units of one type or another. Now Backblaze has nothing less than 194,749 units in general, of which 3,537 would have been bootable and 191,212 were data storage units.
In the former we find what is really interesting, because they are divided into 1,557 HDD units and 1,980 SSDs, but unfortunately this time the company did not reveal the data of these and therefore focused exclusively on unit data. In return, they show us the general comparative data between HDD vs SSD in terms of their AFR. Which models fail the least?
Manufacturers show their reliability on HDD and SSD?
The drive count was done at the end of September of this year and 386 hard drives or SSDs under test have been removed, leaving a total of 190,826 hard drives for storage, which is still more than enough to get from good statistics. .
What the table shows shows several things. The first is that the total failure rate per unit has gone down, but instead the total percentage seems to have gone up because there have been some units and models that ruin the performance of others.
The best possible example is the 12TB HGST drive (model: HUH721212ALE600), which with 2,600 hard drives experienced 0% failures, i.e. no model died or failed. showed signs of weakness. On the other side we have the 14TB Seagate ST14000NM0138 which with 1,630 drives has an AFR of 6.29%.
In fact and if we look by brands, although Seagate is the one that is the most represented (only three models more than the WDC and HGST group) it takes the palm of poor reliability, where only one Toshiba model gets closer with a 4.07%.
A low average AFR, but higher than the SSD
Backblaze makes honorable mention of several hard drive models that it indirectly recommends due to their low number of failures, such as:
- 12 TB HGST (model: HUH728080ALE600).
- Seagate 6TB (Model: ST6000DX000).
- Toshiba 4TB (Model: MD04ABA400V).
- Toshiba 14TB (model: MG07ACA14TEY).
- 16 TB WDC (Model: WUH721816ALE6L0).
Some of these units have more than 70 months of use and there they continue to fight, but this scenario is diametrically opposed when instead of being used for big data, they are used as starter units.
We do not have the data as such, but according to the table, the average AFR of these data units is 1.10%, at startup, it amounts to 6.76% currently. SSDs are in the 1.43%, but here you have to keep one thing in mind: usage time.
As can be seen on the graph, the AFR rate per year of life is very similar in SSD and HDD, where for the latter the curve began to rise from the fifth year. Solid-state hard drives are in their fourth year of life, and comparatively little improves hard drive reliability, which at the time was below the 2%. What will happen next year with SSDs? We will see, but it is possible that they will follow a similar path given the similarity of the charts by years.
