SSDs More Reliable In Long-Term Test

Newly-published tests suggest solid state drives (SSDs) are much more reliable in the long term than traditional drives. The tests only cover a specific use case, but it's one that could let users find a good mix of cost and performance.

SSDs work in a similar way to USB memory sticks, with data accessed through a flow of electricity. It means they don't have any moving parts, unlike a hard drive that spins round and has a moving arm to access data, a little like a vinyl record player.

That brings several key advantages - most notably that SSDs are quicker to access data. They are also significantly less susceptible to physical damage and parts wearing out. And they aren't as reliant on the physical arrangement of the data to boost efficiency, hence not needing defragmentation.

The downside is that SSDs are still considerably more expensive than traditional drives of the same capacity. That means any comparison between the two may depend on how significant the greater resilience is in reality.

Real World Testing

Most testing of hard drives involves reading and writing to them consistently for a short period, meaning a much faster pace of use than is normal in the real world.

Researchers then usually take the failure rates and figure out how long it would take average users to read or write to the disk that number of times and then extrapolate the expected lifespan.

However, an online storage and backup company called BackBlaze has been tracking its use of both SSDs and hard drives to find out how long they lasted in the real world. While its use pattern isn't exactly the same as ordinary business of consumer users, it's a lot closer than what happens in lab testing.

BackBlaze says that across the first four years of use, SSDs were consistently more reliable than traditional drives, though both showed a similar trend of increasing failure rates in the second year and then little change through to the fourth year. (Source: theregister.com)

Year Five Brings Surprise

The big surprise came in the fifth year where the failure rate for traditional drives almost doubled, while the failure rate for SSDs actually fell. At this point the chances of an SSD failing during the year were under one percent, compared with almost four percent for traditional drives. (Source: techradar.com)

BackBlaze will continue to monitor the results in future years. That should make for interesting findings as in previous tests, traditional drives have become increasingly unreliable between five and eight years.

One important caveat is that the test specifically looked at drives used as boot disks, meaning they housed the operating system and were used when the computer started up. That does mean the results could be good news for users who've chosen to solve the cost vs performance dilemma by having smaller SSD as a bootup disk to house data and documents.

What's Your Opinion?

How reliable have you found hard drives? Do you look at reliability test results when buying a drive? How long do you expect a hard drive to last?