Are SSDs More Reliable Than Hard Drives? | Hacker News Reader

Are SSDs More Reliable Than Hard Drives?

backblaze.com

Their level of commitment to The Truth(tm) is awesome:

"Where does that leave us in choosing between buying a SSD or a HDD? Given what we know to date, using the failure rate as a factor in your decision is questionable. Once we controlled for age and drive days, the two drive types were similar and the difference was certainly not enough by itself to justify the extra cost of purchasing a SSD versus a HDD. At this point, you are better off deciding based on other factors: cost, speed required, electricity, form factor requirements, and so on."

At this point, I will go with SSD for performance reasons no matter what these articles say. Price is totally reasonable and justifiable for the performance benefits. This might not be the case for large data centers but for average server room with 30-50 drives, SSD is a no brainer at this point.

At work, I've been using hundreds of the top of the line SSD drives from a certain S company. The drives are used 100% from the start in 1U servers. The failure rate for them is higher than HD imo. The more worrying thing is that none of the drivess' SMART hinted their imminent failure. The drive would just die one morning, taking all the data with it.

Thank god for their 10 years warranty. I guess people like me is the reason why the S company lowered the warranty to 5 years for their next generation product.

taking all the data with it

Man, I thought the failure mode of SSDs was (mostly) "can't write anymore, but can at least read, so backup NOW and get a new one". Or am I overanalyzing parent's statement, and taking it too literally?

I don't have a lot of experience with SSDs, but my impression is that their failure mode tends to be abrupt complete failure.

The "soft" failure mode is based on the assumption that the flash chip wear-out is the failure mode and thus the worn out pages will be (slowly) accumulating and being (gracefully) replaced with non-worn-out pages. If that happens, the failure would indeed be gradual and result in the SSD going into a read-only mode.

My (limited) experience is that is not the dominant failure mode. It would be really useful if BackBlaze could weigh in on their failure mode experiences.

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It is like LED lights where the manufacturer advertises essentially infinite LED life and they are not lying; the LEDs last a very long time. The problem is, the dominant failure mode is the electronics that power the LEDs and have a MUCH shorter life that the LEDs themselves. <cough> cheap caps </cough>

This is marketing and wishful thinking, most times when SSD dies critical system nand gets corrupted. Intel was boasting about safe read only failover, and then when it turned out their shit drives just die like the rest they invented "we shutdown read access to protect our clients" :---)

https://techreport.com/review/26523/the-ssd-endurance-experi...

"After a reboot, the SSD disappeared completely from the Intel software. It was still detected by the storage driver, but only as an inaccessible, 0GB SATA device.

According to Intel, this end-of-life behavior generally matches what’s supposed to happen. The write errors suggest the 335 Series had entered read-only mode. When the power is cycled in this state, a sort of self-destruct mechanism is triggered, rendering the drive unresponsive. "

We're sticking with Intel at work (now SK hynix for capacity I guess) and we've had great success, but we replace drives quite early in their life, we don't even let them wear past 90% reallocs still available. We've had a couple Samsungs, albeit a bit cheaper they've failed horribly many times.

Inmy experienc SSDs fail hard and without much warning though they are often designed to try and go into a read only mode to prevent further writes. That being said, all the SSDs I've had fail on me were nearly new like just imaged/deployed, had power issues that maybe killed the controller vs the storage itself, or just died. One drive I was using for VMs at home just stopped running and when connected prevented the entire PC from posting.

That being said, I'll happily take the speed increase of solid state over spinning disks given I'm not storing media, at least for consumer sized drives. 5 years is much more realistic for general tech lifespan before a newer/faster/cheaper/more efficient upgrade in the enterprise space and definitely the consume space.

>At work, I've been using hundreds of the top of the line SSD drives from a certain S company

that really doesn't help narrowing it down. we have:

1. samsung

2. seagate

3. sandisk

4. sabrent

5. sk hynix

6. silicon power

I interpreted it as Samsung, and I think that's consistent with the statement about 10 and 5 year warranties.

> The drives are used 100% from the start

Looks horrible usage for SSD wear leveling and other functionality.

If you’re using them in 1U servers, then those machines should be data less, and treated like cattle, not pets.

Keep the data on one or more file servers on the network, which has/have lots of built-in redundancy and other backup and DR facilities.

SSDs are getting better and better, however it appears that if they die, they do without giving any hints, while HDs often send signals that if caught in time allow to back up important things before they stop functioning (errors, slowness, noises and clicks etc.) That is not an excuse for not keeping updated backups, but tell this to the average Joe.

My personal approach is this one: no probs with SSDs on my laptops as they don't contain data that is not already backed up elsewhere. On my NAS I use only HDs and plan not to change this for several years. On desktop machines there are two possibilities: either a boot SSD and homes+documents+etc. on a HD, or if space permits, everything on a SSD but a cron script will rsync important things regularly on a mirror HD.

>SSDs are getting better and better, however it appears that if they die, they do without giving any hints

Is this backed up by empirical evidence? I've heard of SSDs randomly dying, but I've also heard of SSDs going into read-only mode. Apparently for hard drives only 64% of failures can be predicted by SMART:

>36% of failed drives did so without recording any S.M.A.R.T. error at all, except the temperature, meaning that S.M.A.R.T. data alone was of limited usefulness in anticipating failures.[5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

Agreed. No drive is failproof when even accidental deleting can happen. The raw truth has always been the same... backups. Off site backups in addition to local backups... Cloud storage as well, back that thing up. Unless of course the files are not important.

I think this analysis is missing how most people want to take their hard drives or SSDs on the go in their laptops.

That movement is likely to tilt the scale significantly in favor of SSDs as spinning disks are much more vulnerable to outside forces.

I think by now, the performance and price of SSDs makes them an obvious choice for almost everyone for their PC/laptop. Even pre-NVME SSD's made boot times significantly faster, it's almost night and day.

However if you store highly sensitive information that you don't want to lose, then I'd always be looking at a secondary storage location regardless of the medium.

From my personal experience, I have used SSD's for around 7 years now, back when even 128GB wasn't cheap. I haven't had a problem. But I have also had a 3.5" HDD in my little server running non-stop for almost 8 years now and it's still going strong.

And I've got a 3.5" HDD in what is currently an x86 Linux router...14 years of runtime according to SMART.

No. https://telegra.ph/file/13622af6a45869bb43020.png

I'd like to see failure rate for their other solid state parts like motherboard or HBA for comparison.

note this analysis applies to a datacenter; for regular users, ssds are absolutely more reliable (ever knock an hdd over?)

Are you sure about this? Where's the data?

.. because I've knocked over HDD's, and never yet caused one to fail due to it.

They are more fragile, I'll give you that.

Show me a 15 or 20 year old SSD that's still working! I worked with 20 year old hard drives that still run like new.

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