“For 2022, the average temperature was 34.9 degrees Celsius. He also found that the SSD temperatures were higher than that of Backblaze’s disk drives. He did find the SMART temperature recording was standard enough to permit a heat comparison between the SSDs Backblaze used, and found a bell curve, a normal distribution.

That means you can’t use such SMART statistics to make valid comparisons between the drives. “Terms like wear leveling, endurance, lifetime used, life used, LBAs written, LBAs read, and so on are used inconsistently between manufacturers, often using different SMART attributes, and sometimes they are not recorded at all.” Klein notes that the SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) used for drive state reporting is applied inconsistently by manufacturers. The failure reasons are not known, and why should they be? Only an SSD manufacturer would have the staff and equipment needed to diagnose a failed SSD.īackblaze’s Andy Klein writes: “There were 13 different models in use, most of which are considered consumer grade SSDs … Six of the seven models had a limited number of drive days – less than 10,000 – meaning that there is not enough data to make a reliable projection about the failure rates of those drive models.” Not so SMART The reliability difference is much less than we would have expected. In a 1,000-HDD population, we would expect 16.4 to fail while with 1,000 SSDs we expect 9.8 to fail – a difference of 6.6 drives.

Based on its SSD and HDD AFR percentages, the difference is 1.64 – 0.98 = 0.66, not even one in 100 drives.

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