Backblaze Has Released Their First Drive Stats Report For SSDs (backblaze.com) 32
Backblaze has published its first SSD edition of the Drive Stats report. A Slashdot reader writes: This edition focuses exclusively on their SSDs as opposed to their quarterly and annual Drive Stats reports which, until last year, focused exclusively on HDDs. Initially they expect to publish the SSD edition twice a year, although that could change depending on its value to readers. They'll continue to publish the HDD Drive Stats reports quarterly. It's an interesting look at SSD reliability in a commercial environment and may be useful to anyone wondering what drive they should (or shouldn't) consider for their own deployment.
Comparison (Score:2)
Will they do a comparison of HDD vs. SSD? That's what I want to know...and I want the info spoon-fed to me of course!
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Too early to tell...the two groups (SSDs and HDDs) are not at the same point in their life cycles.
Rather hilarious to be thinking about "life cycles" in IT when every historian from the 60s predicted we would be sitting around discussing optimum cruising speeds on the flying car superhighway by now, not sitting in traffic bitching about the challenges of spinning rust like our great-grandpappy used to do.
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They already have AFR rates and drive days in the report.
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TFA says they're working on it.
Extending the comparison, the cumulative (lifetime) AFR for our hard drives was 1.40% as noted in our 2021 Drive Stats report. But, as we have noted in our comparison of HDDs and SSDs, the two groups (SSDs and HDDs) are not at the same point in their life cycles. As promised, we’ll continue to examine that dichotomy over the coming months.
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The release of this data is a great public service. However, the SSD data is extremely preliminary as the number of drives and drive-days are both very low, so low that seeing contradictory results in the future wouldn't be that surprising.
Looking forward to future data.
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Yes, and I'm hoping to see many more brands of SSDs. Kudos to Backblaze for being so open with this very useful info.
I see they're already doing charity for Ukraine. I'll suggest they set up a donation account so people can contribute toward paying for Ukraine's hosting / data at Backblaze.
Link (Score:4, Informative)
Here it is. [backblaze.com]
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It's also (for once) the only link in the summary.
Re:Link (Score:4, Informative)
It was not there before, I guess someone corrected it; just helping out.
Samsung only a footnote (Score:2)
Too bad, I rely on Samsung SSDs exclusively in my house and they {#`%${%&`+'${`%&NO CARRIER
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Your Hayes is showing.
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> Too bad, I rely on Samsung SSDs exclusively in my house
Good move. Another recent report showed that only Samsung and Intel drives don't lie in SMART/ATA about their reallocated sectors.
Besides, what is a Dell or HP SSD? Those aren't made by Dell or HP. At least Samsung and Intel make chips.
I appreciate Backblaze but this report is less useful than their HDD reports.
Re:Samsung only a footnote (Score:5, Informative)
HP also sold drives that quit working after 32768 hours https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/... [hpe.com]
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Anybody know who made those HPE drives? Older info says SanDisk, but I'm not aware of problems with similar SanDisk drives. It's possible HPE modded or wrote their own firmware.
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Another recent report showed that only Samsung and Intel drives don't lie in SMART/ATA about their reallocated sectors.
Are they lying, or just using their own SMART parameter structure?
I have a SanDisk that generic SMART doesn't understand much of the internal parameters, but the official SanDisk "Dashboard" app does decode everything. Well, unless it's 1) lying, or 2) just coding error.
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> Too bad, I rely on Samsung SSDs exclusively in my house
Good move. Another recent report showed that only Samsung and Intel drives don't lie in SMART/ATA about their reallocated sectors.
I use all Samsung as well. Got a link for that report?
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They probably just cost too much compared to the other options, even after accounting for failures. They don't even cost a lot, so I'd still go with Samsung.
Inland? (Score:2)
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I forget who makes them... I had figured it out a couple of years ago. I have a few of them and have had no problems. I know that's not statistically relevant, just my limited experience.
A good friend who uses lots of SSDs for video and photography (they'll fill several SSDs in one shoot) said he had lots of total loss with Samsung, Crucial, and most others, and that only SanDisk were 100% reliable for him. But now they're owned by WD, so who knows.
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SSD's really don't like it when you fill them up all the way, over and over again. Maybe the Sandisk drives have a larger (hidden) reserved area to prevent this?
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Very good insight. I'll have to ask aforementioned friends if they tend to fill the SSDs. The guy probably doesn't, but his fiancee almost assuredly does. Warrants a long-overdue phonecall. Thanks!
Re: Inland? (Score:2)
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When SSDs die they tend to become completely inaccessible. HDDs might get read errors but you can usually recover a lot of the data.
As such, it's even more important to make sure you have a backup of anything valuable kept on an SSD.
FWIW I have only ever had an Intel SSD die. Samsung, Crucial and Adata have been reliable for me.
Re: Inland? (Score:2)
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I think it depends on which Samsungs. I think the newer, value priced ones are worse in performance. The 840 Pro (I think) were endurance tested by a couple of people and didn't fail until way past their endurance ratings, into the petabytes.
Samsung almost surely over-engineered them and figured out how to make a cheaper drive that was also proportionally less reliable.
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Re: Inland? (Score:2)
What I wished they covered-Failure mode (Score:2)
I wish they would clearly identify drives that failed 100% no warning vs. drives that advised incoming failure.
if it is a platter problem- with smart warnings given and time to address vs. failures of an unexpected nature such as a controller failure where 'it died' on zero notice..
If 20 of a model failed with warnings, it's still a better buy than two that died like a lightning bolt to the server.
Not really much in there (Score:2)
No Samsung SSDs, for example, mostly Seagate. But it does show that at least 2nd rate brands (unless you count Seagate as 3rd rate) are still not too reliable.