- Seagate and Western Digital dominate trustworthiness rankings in massive real-world data sets
- The annualized failure rate falls to 1.36% at 344,196 units
- Vibration emerges as suspected cause behind sudden reliability collapse
Backblaze has released its 2025 drive reliability data, offering 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 ran for 115,638,676 days during the year and found that 4,317 drives in the group failed, resulting in an annualized failure rate (AFR) of 1.36%.
Despite the failure, the figure is an improvement on the previous year’s 1.57% and continues a gradual decline from previous results, with every model in the fleet recording at least one failure, reinforcing that no hard drive is immune to wear and tear or operational stress.
Unit Reliability Trends Show Steady Improvement
However, several units stood out as having exceptionally low failure rates. The Seagate ST16000NM002J 16TB recorded only one failure during the year.
Western Digital WUH722626ALE6L4 26TB also recorded a single failure, although it was only deployed for a 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 the Seagate and Western Digital models as performing well in this data set, the same report identified drives with high quarterly failure rates.
In Q4 2025, the HGST HUH728080ALE600 8TB recorded a failure rate of 10.29%, marking the first double-digit figure for that model.
Backblaze investigated possible 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 are already scheduled for retirement.
Other drives with notable rates in the fourth quarter include the 10TB Seagate ST10000NM0086 at 5.23% and the 16TB Toshiba MG08ACA16TEY at 4.14%.
Toshiba’s figure represents a significant drop from 16.95% in the previous quarter, following a firmware update aimed at fixing the issue.
The rate is still higher than the fleet average, but further normalization is expected as the rollout of the updated firmware continues.
Beyond reliability metrics, the report also reveals that storage economics continue to change as HDD capacity continues to increase.
However, the cost per gigabyte had been trending downward before supply disruptions in late 2025 hit memory and storage components.
Despite still being cheaper than SSDs and RAM per gigabyte, HDD prices have increased and the Seagate Barracuda 24TB now sells 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 disk age, workload, and environment remain critical variables.
While the aggregate AFR has improved, the performance of individual models still varies significantly.
Therefore, careful deployment decisions need to be made that consider workload demands and even data handling patterns at the CPU level.
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