SSDs More Reliable Than HDDs: Backblaze Study

techpowerup.com

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I'm surprised to learn from this piece that this wasn't always the case, as I would intuitively think that moving parts are prone to wearing out, and intuitively think of circuits with no moving parts as reliable -- at least if they don't have manufacturing defects and don't drastically overheat or something.

and intuitively think of circuits with no moving parts as reliable

Yes. It's counterintuitive to realise that non-mechanical parts are more prone to 'burn-out' rather than 'wear-out'.

I've only just got over my reluctance to entrust large volumes of data (6 TB) to SSDs rather than HDDs. But I'm still a bit twitchy about that. Time will tell whether or not my fears are justified.

This 'Study' post[0] points out a distinction in how SSD vs HDD are used within Backblaze:

> Keep in mind that the average age of the SSDs Backblaze uses is only 12.7 months old, whereas the average age of its hard drives is 4x older, 49.6 months to be precise. Also, Blackblaze uses SSDs as boot drives alone in its servers, so these SSDs could also have less of a workload compared to the actual hard drives where are constantly being used to backup client data.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27075392

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