According to cloud storage company Backblaze, solid-state drives (SSDs) are more reliable than hard drives (HDDs), at least for certain use cases, but that may not actually make much of a difference when choosing a storage type, reports ZDNet.

Backblaze provides cloud backup services for laptops and desktops and offers its cloud storage to businesses.
This year the company decided to contribute to the debate about whether hard drives or solid-state drives are more reliable.
And I found out, in particular, that SSDs are more reliable than HDDs over five years of use. But this is not the only thing you should think about when buying.
The Backblaze cloud platform uses a combination of SSDs and HDDs as boot drives for storage servers. Since 2018, the company has replaced failed boot HDDs mainly with 2.5-inch SSDs (some M. 2 drives). Backblaze SSD/HDD drives boot the storage servers and also store log files and temporary files created by the storage server.
Today, Backblaze has over 2,500 SSDs (a mix of Crucial, Dell, Micron, Seagate and Western Digital) and stores over 2 EB of data. The company measures the reliability of SSDs and HDDs by tracking annual failure rate (AFR) to shed light on the "previously opaque world of hard drive failure rates" and apparently bolster discussion about the technology behind its service.
To account for the age difference between the older hard drives and the newer SSDs it compared with, the company last year published AFRs for SSDs and "life-controlled" HDDs.
It turned out that SSDs fail less often, but not significantly.
(The problem with the data was that the failure rate of hard drives increases sharply after five years, and there is no five-year data yet for solid-state drives. ) “The difference, of course, on its own is not enough to justify the additional cost of purchasing an SSD over an HDD,” the study authors concluded, noting that when purchasing either technology, it is better to consider factors such as cost, required speed, power consumption, and form factor.
Now, with five years of SSD data, the company has come to a different conclusion—albeit with some caution. The lifetime AFR for HDD and SSD in the fourth year was 1.83 and 1.05%, respectively, and in the fifth year the gap widened: 3.55% for HDD versus 0.92% for SDD.
The lifetime AFRs for HDDs in years six, seven and eight were 5.23, 6.26 and 6.93%, respectively. How SSDs will fare in these years remains to be seen.
“At this point, we can safely say that SSDs are more reliable than HDDs, at least when used as boot drives in our environment,” Backblaze said in a post.
The company adds: “It's safe to say that SSD failure rates will eventually start to rise.
It's also possible that they'll run into big problems at some point, perhaps when they start to reach the wear and tear limits of the media." However, this is just one of the factors that consumers must weigh when purchasing drives, while price remains a key factor, given that a 1TB SSD costs at least twice as much as an HDD of similar capacity.
Backblaze notes that actually using failure rate as a factor in decision making is questionable. After accounting for age and days of use, both types of drives were similar in this regard, and the difference in performance alone was not enough to justify the additional cost of purchasing an SSD compared to an HDD.
"At this point, you're better off making your decision based on other factors: cost, speed requirements, electricity, form factor requirements, etc.," the company recommends.