Research Finds SSDs are Now WAY More Reliable than HDDs

SSDs (Solid State Drives) have certainly come a long way since they initially made their debut. Even though they have only become more commonplace over the last decade in desktop PCs, however, would it surprise you to learn that this year (technically) marks the storage solutions’ 30th birthday? – Going back to those early days, though, and even as recently as 10 years ago, SSD didn’t get off to the best of starts. Put simply, reliability was a major problem. A factor that is, thankfully, no longer associated with the technology.

Following a report via TechPowerUp, however, just in case you needed further convincing of this fact, new research released by ‘Backblaze’ shows that when directly comparing HDDs with SSDs, the latter wins out big time in the durability stakes!

SSDs Smash HDDs for Reliability

Following extensive research, specifically from the Enterprise market, it has been found that based on a similar number of models utilized, the failure rate of the SSDs was only 0.58% for Q1 2021. Compared to the 10.56% found in HDDs, this is clearly a huge gap and more than indicative of just how much stronger and better SSD designs have become over recent years.

It does, however, get far more interesting when you check out the figures since 2013. While SSDs had a fairly comparable failure rate beforehand, ever since that point, Solid State Drives have only averaged a 0.65% failure rate, while HDDs were around 6.04%.

What Do We Think?

These days the general focus of SSD marketing is on speed rather than reliability. Overall, however, with the kinks in the system now largely worked out, there are clearly several advantages to transitioning to the storage system. One of the biggest is that HDDs utilize mechanical parts, whereas Solid State Drives do not. So, where things are not moving, they can not, generally speaking, break (one of the biggest selling points of electric cars).

Yes, SSDs do have a lifespan limited to the amount of data that gets rewritten. With more modern versions utilizing technology that can isolate bad sectors, however, if you’re not in it for the speed, then at least now you know you can be in it for the reliability!

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!