Are SSDs more reliable than HDDs? This research may have the answer

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Solid state drives (SSDs) are more reliable than hard disk drives (HDDs) – at least for certain use cases, according to cloud-storage firm Backblaze. But that might not actually make much of a difference when deciding what type of storage you should buy.

The company this year was looking to settle a debate over whether HDDs or SSDs are more reliable. Backblaze provides a cloud-backup service for laptops and computers and offers its B2 cloud storage to enterprises.

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It uses a mix of SSDs and HDDs as storage server boot drives in the Backblaze Cloud Storage platform. Since 2018, it's replaced failed HDD boot drives with mostly 2.5-inch SSDs (some are M.2 form factor drives). Backblaze's SSD/HDD drives boot its storage servers as well as store log files and temporary files produced by the storage server. Today, Backblaze has over 2,500 SSDs (a mix of Crucial, Dell, Micron, Seagate and Western Digital) and stores over two exabytes of data.

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The company measures SSD and HDD reliability by tracking the annualized failure rate (AFR) of SSDs and HDDs to shed light on the "previously opaque world of hard drive failure rates" and, obviously, to generate debate about the technologies behind its service. 

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