A recent study released takes a look at the reliability of solid-state drives (SSD) and hard disk drives (HDD) in PCs. However, the study is not as one-sided as many PC players may expect.
The report comes from Backblaze, a cloud backup provider well known for releasing reliability reports. Backblaze only started using SSDs a little bit more than two years ago, so its newest reliability report is the first that includes them alongside their HDD counterparts. With SSD prices dropping quickly, it is interesting to see how their failure rates compare to that of an HDD.
The report looks at 1,518 SSDs and 1,669 HDDs that all operate in the same environment, making them perfect for such a test. The report is quarterly, so it covers from the start of this year to March 31. In that time only two SSDs failed, which leads to an annualized failure rate of 0.58%, which is pretty impressive. On the other hand, 44 HDDs failed in that time period, giving Backblaze a much higher annualized failure rate of 10.56%. With both the Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 including SSD memories, the results are pretty comforting for gamers no matter their platform of preference. However, Backblaze warns that the numbers may not be as clear-cut as they seem.
The caveat comes in from the sizable age disparity between the company's HDDs and SSDs. It reports that its average SSD is 12.7 months old whereas its average HDD is a whopping 49.6 months old. The difference in age leads Backblaze to conclude that the efficacy difference between the two is not clear as the two types of drives age very differently from one another. The official report states that an accurate comparison between the two drive types will not possible until the company's SSDs become older and are more comparable to their HDDs. All in all, this is pretty good news, as the industry has seen some signs of games requiring SSDs in the future as they become more common amongst gamers.
It will be interesting to see how future reliability reports from Backblaze find SSDs to compare to HDDs as they age. The report does not mention the factor that SSDs have a limited write durability that may impact their performance when used for frequent backups. For this reason Backblaze says that the SSDs are used for the company's files rather than as back-ups for customers, so it will be interesting to see the future comparison. However, it definitely looks as though SSDs are more reliable than HDDs at the early stages of their use at the very least, so they may be an option for any gamers looking to upgrade their storage space with an SSD soon.
Source: Backblaze