One of the touted advantages of solid state devices, compared with mechanical machines of similar function, is that with fewer moving parts, solid state machines should be less likely to fail. A study by data center operator Backdrive suggests that is the case.
A year-long study of boot drive reliability including both hard disk drives and solid state storage showed lower average failure rates for SSD.
“At this point we can reasonably claim that SSDs are more reliable than HDDs, at least when used as boot drives in our environment,” says Backdrive.
Boot drives store log files and temporary files produced by storage servers. Each day a boot drive reads, writes, and deletes files depending on the activity of the storage server itself.
Backblaze began replacing its HDD boot drives in late 2018 with SSD machines.
What Backblaze does not yet know is how the SSD aging process will affect average failure rates for boot drives. It simply does not have the same amount of longevity yet, for those devices.
In this case, it appears that intuition or opinion about failure rates of SSD compared to HDD is confirmed.
Of course, there are trade offs. SSDs cost more than HDDs. Some might also argue that, despite the Backblaze findings, HDDs might still have longer useful lives. Also, some will point out that SSDs are arguably “better” for boot drive use cases, while HDD might still be deemed superior for long term storage.
All engineering decisions involve choices.
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