- Seagate and Western Digital dominate reliability rankings across massive real-world datasets
- Annualized failure rate falls to 1.36% across 344,196 drives
- Vibration emerges as the suspected cause behind the sudden reliability collapse
Backblaze has released its 2025 drive reliability data, offering one of the clearest large-scale snapshots of HDD performance in active data centers.
The cloud storage and data backup firm examined 344,196 drives that collectively operated for 115,638,676 days during the year, finding 4,317 drives in the pool failed, resulting in an Annualized Failure Rate (AFR) of 1.36%.
Despite the failure, the figure is an improvement over the previous year’s 1.57% and continues a gradual decline from earlier results – and every model in the fleet recorded at least one failure, which reinforces that no HDD is immune to wear or operational stress.
Drive reliability trends show steady improvement
However, several drives stood out for exceptionally low failure counts. The Seagate ST16000NM002J 16TB recorded just one failure across the year.
Western Digital WUH722626ALE6L4 26TB also logged a single failure, though it was deployed for only one quarter.
Toshiba’s MG09ACA16TE 16TB followed with three failures, while the Seagate ST12000NM000J 12TB and HGST HMS5C4040BLE640 4TB recorded four and five failures, respectively.
While those results support Seagate and Western Digital models as strong performers in this dataset, the same report identified drives with elevated quarterly failure rates.
In the fourth quarter of 2025, the HGST HUH728080ALE600 8TB posted a 10.29% failure rate, marking the first double-digit figure for that 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 roughly 7.5 years old and already scheduled for retirement.
Other drives with notable fourth quarter 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 prior quarter, following a firmware update intended to correct the issue.
The rate remains higher than the fleet average, but further normalization is expected as updated firmware deployment continues.
Beyond reliability metrics, the report also reveals that storage economics keep shifting as HDD capacity continues to increase.
However, the cost per gigabyte had been trending downward before supply disruptions in late 2025 affected memory and storage components.
Despite remaining cheaper than SSDs and RAM on a per — gigabyte basis, HDD prices have risen with the Seagate Barracuda 24TB now selling for $389.99 on Newegg, a 56% increase from its $249.99 price tag 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.
While the aggregate AFR improved, individual model performance still varies significantly.
Therefore, there is a need for careful deployment decisions that consider workload demands and even CPU-level data handling patterns.
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