For years it has been claimed that SSDs are much more reliable than HDD hard drives. But new research from cloud backup and storage service provider Backblaze suggests that's not always the case.
In a recent experiment, both variants were tested, analyzing the performance of the SSD and HDD in the same environment, performing the same functions and with the same workload, with the devices also of the same age and have had to operate in a relatively short time for the same period of time. The final answer is that hardly any differences have been perceived.
Reliability, no matter an SSD than a hard drive
The results found that the Annual Failure Rate (AFR) for HDDs was 1,38%, while the AFR for SSDs was 1,05%. Backblaze claims that they have evidence that when both types of drives are relatively recent with just over a year old, SSDs fail less often, but not much.
For now, the data is provisional because to get rid of doubts and have reliable long-term data, it will be necessary to do the experiment for years. If we want to choose primary storage, they further suggest that we decide based on other factors such as cost, required speed, power consumption, or form factor requirements.
Backblaze is going to keep experimenting until there are conclusive results on the reliability difference between SSDs and hard drives. They hope to decide whether or not to add the AFR to the SSD vs HDD buying guide checklist.
Until now, Solid State Drives are generally considered a more reliable alternative to HDD drives considering the fact that they have no moving parts that can break after prolonged use. Nowadays, it is recommended that you have a bootable SSD to house the operating system and large recurring applications for its speed, while a hard disk stores resources and applications that do not require as much transfer speed.
Source: TechRadar
