Backblaze started including SSDs to its arsenal the fourth quarter of 2018. By the top of 2021, it was internet hosting 2,200 SSDs. That quantity grew to 2,558 SSDs by the top of 2022, and as of June 30, 2023, the cloud backup agency is utilizing 3,144 SSDs in its storage servers.
“On this atmosphere, the drives do far more than boot the storage servers. Additionally they retailer log recordsdata and short-term recordsdata produced by the storage server. Every day a boot drive will learn, write, and delete recordsdata relying on the exercise of the storage server itself,” Backblaze explains.
Drive stats and developments change into extra significant over time, as they’re much less skewed by outliers. That is necessary to contemplate as a result of if wanting on the knowledge with none form of lens, an 829.55% annualized failure price (AFR) for Seagate’s 240GB SSDSCKKB240GZR seems reasonably damning. However the satan is within the particulars.
There have been simply two of these drive fashions at the start of the yr, one in all which failed shortly after it was put in. The opposite drive continues to be working and thus has a 0% AFR.
“Which AFR is helpful? On this case neither, we simply don’t have sufficient knowledge to get first rate outcomes. For any given drive mannequin, we prefer to see a minimum of 100 drives and 10,000 drive days in a given quarter at the least earlier than we start to contemplate the calculated AFR to be ‘affordable’,” Backblaze states.
The info continues to be included for the sake of completeness and should you’re eager to dive into the numbers, by all means, that is why these frequent audits exist. However by way of significant evaluation, arguably probably the most helpful is a bath curve that Backblaze put collectively.
Beforehand, Backblaze graphed its HDD failure over time to see how they match to the traditional bathtub curve utilized in reliability engineering. Here is how SSDs evaluate within the still-early going…
“Whereas the precise curve (blue line) produced by the SSD failures over every quarter is a bit ‘lumpy’, the development line (second order polynomial) does have a particular bathtub curve look to it,” Backblaze says. “The development line is a couple of 70% match to the information, so we are able to’t be too assured of the curve at this level, however for the restricted quantity of information we’ve, it’s shocking to see how the occurrences of SSD failures are on a path to adapt to the tried-and-true bathtub curve.”
There’s actually no substitute for time and so we might see failure developments change as extra SSDs come into the combination, and present ones rack up extra days, weeks, months, and years of service. Whether or not SSDs take a protracted dip on the bathtub curve stays to be seen.
No matter what you’re taking away from this, we will not stress sufficient that it’s best to continuously again up your knowledge, particularly the extra necessary bits (treasured household pictures and movies, work tasks, and so forth). A number of backups is the easiest way to go, together with a minimum of one offsite backup, be it a transportable drive saved at relative’s home (or secure deposit field) or within the cloud.
