SSDs “officially” much more reliable than HDDs

Since the SSD arrived on the storage market, the question divides. This is perhaps what finally closes the debate?

Recall schematically that an SSD consists of a PCB and electronic chips. Unlike a “traditional” hard drive, designed around a PCB of course but above all platters on which the data is stored, the SSD is free of mechanical parts.

A still recent technology

A design difference that was enough for SSD advocates to quickly proclaim that the latter is not only faster and more responsive than the HDD, it is also much more robust and reliable.

Some were moved by this perhaps a little hasty conclusion when we only had very little perspective on the technology implemented in SSDs… compared to decades of recording mastery magnetic hard drives.

Today, while SSDs are more than ten years old, we are starting to see things more clearly. The company specializing in the cloud Backblaze uses its study to justify that they are much more reliable and fail less than “traditional” hard drives.

But already more reliable over five years

Of course, just saying it is not enough for it to be a truth. Backblaze publishes to justify its conclusion a report in which it presents the results of SSDs entered in their fifth year of operation.

Some will no doubt say that five years is still not enough to have the necessary hindsight and they will not be completely wrong. Still, the data published by Backblaze already make it possible to highlight a discrepancy between SSDs and hard drives.

On this data, we can actually see that hard drives tend to show significant signs of fatigue from the fourth year. In fact, concerns about NAND memory lifecycles or controller failures may be overstated.

Backblaze’s conclusion still seems to us only partial insofar as we have to see if the trend is not reversed in the more or less near future. Still, after five years of activity – intense one imagines – the SSD is indeed more reliable than the hard drive.

Source : Neowin