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The SSD Edition: 2021 Drive Stats Review

An SSD failure is far more difficult to diagnose than an HDD. Solid-state drives can break down from minor malfunctions like power surge and logical errors, not from the kind of heavy physical damage that kills HDDs. That’s why coming with a guesstimate for the average life of an SSD is tricky.

Image: Sulagna Saha (c) Gestalt IT

An SSD failure happens quietly, and without warning. It does not happen with unnatural noises, or error beeps. In fact, subtle signs like device slow-downs, machine refusing to boot, crashing of applications are the real indicators of a possible SSD failure.

Andy Klein has a very interesting blogpost on Backblaze titled “The SSD Edition: 2021 Drive Stats Review” where he discusses at length the failure rates of SSDs. The article is based on a study conducted by Backblaze in which they looked at 2200 SSDs over the period of a couple years to gain a deeper understanding of their longevity. The stats they came up with are illuminating, to say the least. In his article, Andy writes:

The SSDs in this report are all boot drives in our storage servers. In our early storage servers, we used HDDs exclusively for boot drives. We began using SSDs in this capacity in Q4 of 2018. Since that time, all new storage servers and any with failed HDD boot drives have had SSDs installed. Boot drives in our environment do much more than boot the storage servers, they also store log files and temporary files produced by the storage server. Each day a boot drive will read, write, and delete files depending on the activity of the storage server itself.

Check out his article- “The SSD Edition: 2021 Drive Stats Review” to read his comments and observations from the study.

About the author

Sulagna Saha

Sulagna Saha is a writer at Gestalt IT where she covers all the latest in enterprise IT. She has written widely on miscellaneous topics. On gestaltit.com she writes about the hottest technologies in Cloud, AI, Security and sundry.

A writer by day and reader by night, Sulagna can be found busy with a book or browsing through a bookstore in her free time. She also likes cooking fancy things on leisurely weekends. Traveling and movies are other things high on her list of passions. Sulagna works out of the Gestalt IT office in Hudson, Ohio.