If your drive dies and you have a cloud backup, you won’t lose data, but restoring from the cloud will take a very long time. You should consider replacing your backup drives between the third and sixth year of use. A desktop external hard drive is a great local backup for a computer that mostly stays parked on a desk. Just backing up to one or the other isn’t enough – having both on-site and cloud backups ensures that your data stays safe from localised threats such as fire, theft or natural disaster, as well as internet outages or disruptions to the cloud backup provider. Fortunately, backing up your data is easy, and getting started takes only a few minutes: read our advice and set up a system that will back up your files automatically both to an external hard drive and the cloud. Your computer’s internal drive will stop working someday, and unless your data is backed up, it’ll be gone forever. If you’re not backing up the important documents and photos on your computer, you should start. Though it’s cheaper per terabyte than the other My Book models, it still costs more overall at this writing, so we recommend it only if you know you need that much space. The 8 TB My Book is just as reliable as our top pick, and it was about as fast in our Blu-ray and HD Tune tests, but about four minutes slower in our Time Machine testing. If you need more storage, we recommend the Western Digital 8 TB My Book. The longer Backblaze has these SSDs and puts them through their paces, the more insight it will be able to provide about SSD reliability.īackblaze's complete dataset is available on its Hard Drive Test Data page.Rs 17,296 on Amazon *At the time of publishing, the price was Rs 17,296 It will be interesting to see how the younger model fares over the next year,' the blog said.īackblaze has previously shown the reliability of SSDs over HDDs across a five-year period, but this recent data gives us a model-by-model breakdown of AFRs of SSDs in its arsenal across a slightly longer time period. There is little difference otherwise except the ZA250CM10003 uses less idle power, 116mW versus 185mW for the ZA250CM10002. Model ZA250CM10003 is the newer model of the two by about a year. While the AFR for the Seagate drive (model: ZA250CM10002) slipped in 2022 to nearly 2%. 'The Seagate drive (model: ZA250CM10003) has delivered a sub-1% AFR over all three years. The Crucial SSDs' early failures coincide with the bathtub curve, which expects device failures to occur early in the release cycle before dropping to a stable rate and then increasing as the product ages.īackblaze also highlighted differing AFRs from the 250GB Seagate ZA250CM10003 and 250GB Seagate ZA250CM10002. You may notice a high AFR from the Crucial 250GB CT250MX500SSD1, but note that Backblaze only added the drive in 2021, and it 'recovered nicely in 2022 after having a couple of early failures in 2021,' according to Backblaze, which expects that trend to continue.

The company started using SSDs in 2018 but added most of the drives in the table below within the past three years. So while these aren't apples-to-apples comparisons of SSD models, the table provides a broad glimpse at SSD reliability that the average person can't replicate on their own.īackblaze's blog provides several tables depicting SSD failure rates, but this one looks at AFRs across the entire time Backblaze has used SSDs. Some drives have seen way more active use than others, with active days ranging from 104 days up to 724,240. Backblaze said all SSDs analyzed have 'similar' workloads.īefore we get into Backblaze's first table, which depicts annualized failure rates (AFRs) for 13 different SSDs models, it's important to note the limited sample size of 2,906 drives and differing number of drives for each model.

As detailed by Backblaze's blog post, the company uses SSDs for booting storage servers, as well as reading, writing, and deleting log and temporary files made by said storage servers.

Looking at the 2,906 SSDs in its possession, the company tracked the failure rates of mostly consumer-grade SSDs, which it started using as boot drives at the start of Q4 2018.īackblaze has long shared data on the reliability of hard disk drives (HDDs), but this latest report provides fresh perspective on HDDs' speedier, pricier cousins. Backblaze, a San Mateo, California-based backup and cloud storage firm, on Thursday shared data giving us a unique look at the reliability of SSDs over up to four years of use.

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