Backblaze, purveyor of cloud storage, has printed the statistics (opens in new tab) for the two,906 SSDs used as boot drives on its storage servers. To be clear, these aren’t solely boot drives, as additionally they learn and write log recordsdata and short-term recordsdata, the previous of which might generally generate fairly a bit of wear and tear and tear. Backblaze has been utilizing SSDs for boot drives beginning in 2018, and like its laborious drive statistics, it is one in every of few methods to get lots of perception into how massive portions of largely shopper drives maintain up over time.
Earlier than we get to the stats, there are some {qualifications}. First, many of the SSDs that Backblaze makes use of aren’t the newest M.2 NVMe fashions. They’re additionally typically fairly small in capability, with most drives solely providing 250GB of storage, plus a couple of third which might be 500GB, and solely three which might be bigger 2TB drives. However utilizing a lot of the identical mannequin of {hardware} retains issues easy relating to managing the {hardware}. Anyway, if you happen to’re hoping to see stats for widespread drives that may make our record of the finest SSDs, you will be disillusioned.
Listed below are the stats for the previous 12 months.
Whereas seven of the drive fashions used have zero failures, solely a type of has a big variety of put in drives, the Dell DELLBOSS VD (Boot Optimized Storage Resolution). The opposite six have fewer than 40 SSDs in use, with 4 which might be solely put in in two or three servers. It is extra helpful to concentrate to the drives which have a considerable amount of use, particularly those with over 100,000 drive days.
These include the Essential MX500 250GB, Seagate BarraCuda SSD and SSD 120, and the Dell BOSS. It is fascinating to notice that the common age of the Essential MX500 (opens in new tab) drives is just seven months, despite the fact that the MX500 first turned obtainable in early 2018. Clearly, Backblaze is not an early adopter of the newest SSDs. Nonetheless, total the boot SSDs have an annualized failure fee under 1%.
Stepping again to a good longer view of the previous three years, that 1% annualized failure fee stays, with simply 46 complete drive failure over that point span. Backblaze additionally notes that after two comparatively fast failures in 2021, the MX500 did a lot better in 2022. Seagate’s older ZA250CM10002 additionally slipped to a 2% failure fee final 12 months, whereas the newer ZA250CM10003 had extra days in service and fewer failures, so will probably be fascinating to see if these developments proceed.
One other piece of information Backblaze checked out is SSD temperature, as reported by SMART (the Dell BOSS does not seem to help this). The chart is not zero-based, so it’d seem like there is a respectable quantity of fluctuation at first look, however in actuality the drives ranged from a mean of 34.4C as much as 35.4C — only a 1C span.
In fact that is simply the common, and there are some outliers. There have been 4 observations of a 20C drive, and one occasion of a drive at 61C, with most falling within the 25–42 levels Celsius vary. It will be good if the bell curve seen above additionally correlated with failed drives in some vogue, however with solely 25 complete failures in the course of the 12 months, that was to not be — Backblaze referred to as its ensuing plot “nonsense.”
Finally, the variety of SSDs in use by Backblaze pales compared to the variety of laborious drives — test the newest Backblaze HDD report (opens in new tab), for instance, the place over 290,000 drives have been in use in the course of the previous 12 months. That is as a result of no buyer information will get saved on the SSDs, so that they’re just for the OS, temp recordsdata, and logs. Nonetheless, information from almost 3,000 drives is much more than what any of us (exterior of IT folks) are more likely to entry over the course of a 12 months. The HDDs by the way had an AFR of 1.37%.
Does this show SSDs are extra dependable than HDDs? Probably not, and having an excellent backup technique remains to be important. Hopefully, within the coming years we’ll see newer M.2 SSDs make their means into Backblaze’s information — we would like to see possibly 100 or so every of some PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0 drives, for instance, however that after all assumes that the storage servers even help these interfaces. Given time, they virtually definitely will.