- Seagate and Western Digital dominate reliability rankings on huge real-world data sets
- Annualized failure rate drops to 1.36% on 344,196 drives
- Vibration emerges as suspected cause of sudden reliability collapse
Backblaze has released its drive reliability data for 2025, providing one of the clearest large-scale snapshots of hard drive performance in active data centers.
The cloud storage and data backup company examined 344,196 drives that collectively operated for 115,638,676 days during the year, and found that 4,317 drives in the pool failed, resulting in an annualized failure rate (AFR) of 1.36%.
Despite this failure, this figure is an improvement on the previous year’s 1.57% and continues a gradual decline from previous results – and every model in the fleet recorded at least one failure, reinforcing the fact that no hard drive is safe from wear and tear or operational stress.
Drive Reliability Trends Show Steady Improvement
However, several drives stood out with an exceptionally low number of failures. The Seagate ST16000NM002J 16TB had only one outage during the year.
Western Digital WUH722626ALE6L4 26TB also had a single outage, despite only being deployed for a quarter.
Toshiba’s 16TB MG09ACA16TE followed with three failures, while the 12TB Seagate ST12000NM000J and 4TB HGST HMS5C4040BLE640 recorded four and five failures, respectively.
While these results support the Seagate and Western Digital models as performing very well in this data set, the same report identified drives with high quarterly failure rates.
In Q4 2025, the HGST HUH728080ALE600 8TB posted a failure rate of 10.29%, marking the first double-digit figure for this model.
Backblaze investigated potential environmental causes, including temperature and airflow, but ruled them out.
Vibration is now considered a possible factor, although these units are approximately 7.5 years old and already decommissioned.
Other drives with notable Q4 rates include the Seagate ST10000NM0086 10TB at 5.23% and the Toshiba MG08ACA16TEY 16TB at 4.14%.
Toshiba’s figure represents a significant drop from 16.95% in the previous quarter, following a firmware update intended to correct the problem.
The rate remains above the fleet average, but further normalization is expected as the rollout of updated firmware continues.
Beyond reliability metrics, the report also reveals that the economics of storage continue to evolve as hard drive capacity continues to increase.
However, the cost per gigabyte was trending downward before supply disruptions in late 2025 hit memory and storage components.
While still cheaper than SSDs and RAM per gigabyte, hard drive prices have increased, with the Seagate Barracuda 24TB now selling for $389.99 on Newegg, a 56% increase from its $249.99 price a few months ago.
These results suggest that reliability gains are incremental rather than dramatic, and that drive age, workload, and environment remain critical variables.
Even though the overall AFR has improved, the performance of individual models still varies considerably.
Therefore, it is necessary to make careful deployment decisions that consider workload demands and even CPU-level data processing patterns.
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