Storage specialist Backblaze has published its SSD failure rate report. Currently, the company has a large volume of SSDs, with no fewer than 3144 SSDs in its servers. The company has now released its stats for the first quarter of 2023, with a Seagate failure rate of 830%!
A Seagate SSD reaches 830% failure rate at Backblaze… Not relevant!
Clearly, if the 830% failure rate of a certain Seagate model is scary, it’s simply for statistical reasons. After all, according to the company’s table, the SSDSCKKB240GZR model alone failed after 44 days of operation. The result is a disproportionately high percentage compared with other models from the brand. By comparison, many ZA series models have a 0% failure rate, even after many hours of operation.
In the end, this 830% result is hard to take seriously, and should simply be disregarded. In the second-quarter results, we learn that a second SSD of the same reference had an annual failure rate of 0%, simply because it didn’t fail. Backblaze also explains it very well on its blog:
” we just don’t have enough data to get decent results. For any given drive model, we like to see at least 100 drives and 10,000 drive days in a given quarter as a minimum before we begin to consider the calculated AFR to be “reasonable. “” “
This really begs the question of why the company chose to include the statistics for this SSD in its report. It knew from the outset that it had neither the necessary number of SSDs nor an interesting number of days to draw any usable statistics from them.
Otherwise, on a broader level, the company recorded a significant rise in the failure rate of its SSDs. This rose from 0.96% in the first quarter of 2023 to 1.05% in the second quarter, where the data seems more consistent, totalling over 260,000 days. What’s more, over a much wider five-year period (October 2018 to June 2023), the annual failure rate is 0.90% on 2,433,310d of cumulative tests.
