In the meantime, all of the SSDs which have failed to date are reactive failures, that is: They just stopped working. As we add and monitor more SSDs to our farm, we intend on building out our rules for proactive SSD drive failure. This limits the amount of data we have for research. In addition, as you’ll see, there are a limited number of SSD failures.

Many of the attributes cited are drive model or vendor dependent. Please reach out in the comments if you can shed any light on the missing attributes.Īll that said, we are just at the beginning of using SMART stats to proactively fail a SSD. #įor the remaining six (16, 17, 168, 170, 218, and 245), we are unable to find their definitions. To date, we record 31 SMART stats attributes related to SSDs. Different SSD models report different SMART stats, with some overlap. Backblaze records the SMART attributes for every data and boot drive in operation each day.Īs with HDDs, we also record and monitor SMART stats for SSD drives. The primary function of SMART is to report on various indicators related to drive reliability with the intent being to anticipate drive failures. SMART, or S.M.A.R.T., stands for Self-monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology and is a monitoring system included in HDDs and SSDs. For hard drives, much of the data we use to determine a proactive failure comes from the SMART stats we monitor that are reported by the drive.

In our quarterly Drive Stats reports, we define hard drive failure as either reactive, meaning the drive is no longer operational, or proactive, meaning we believe that drive failure is imminent. What Does Drive Failure Look Like for SSDs and HDDs?

All of that is fine for SSD marketing purposes, but for comparing failure rates, we prefer the Drive Stats way: direct comparison. This statement is generally attributed to SSDs having no moving parts and is supported by vendor proclamations and murky mean time between failure (MTBF) computations. And while our SSD 101 series has covered topics like upgrading, troubleshooting, and recycling your SSDs, we’d like to test one of the more popular declarations from SSD proponents: that SSDs fail much less often than our old friend, the hard disk drive (HDD). Solid-state drives (SSDs) continue to become more and more a part of the data storage landscape.

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