- Seagate and Western Digital dominate reliability rankings across massive real-world datasets
- The annual failure rate drops 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 company examined 344,196 drives that ran for a combined 115,638,676 days during the year and found 4,317 drives in the pool failed, resulting in an annual 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 – and every model in the fleet recorded at least one failure, reinforcing that no HDD is immune to wear or operational stress.
Drive reliability trends show steady improvement
However, several drives stood out for unusually low error rates. The Seagate ST16000NM002J 16TB registered only one failure during the year.
The Western Digital WUH722626ALE6L4 26TB also recorded a single failure, although it was only deployed for one quarter.
Toshiba’s MG09ACA16TE 16TB followed with three failures, while the Seagate ST12000NM000J 12TB and HGST HMS5C4040BLE640 4TB registered four and five failures respectively.
While these results support Seagate and Western Digital models as strong performers in this data set, the same report identified drives with elevated quarterly failure rates.
In the fourth quarter of 2025, the HGST HUH728080ALE600 8TB had a failure rate of 10.29%, marking the first double-digit number 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 about 7.5 years old and already slated for retirement.
Other drives with notable Q4 prices 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 that was supposed to fix the problem.
The rate remains higher than the fleet average, but further normalization is expected as the updated firmware implementation continues.
In addition to reliability metrics, the report also reveals that storage economics continue to shift as HDD capacity continues to increase.
The price per however, gigabytes had been in decline 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 a few months ago.
These findings suggest that reliability gains are incremental rather than dramatic, and that age, workload, and environment remain critical variables.
While overall AFR improved, individual model performance still varies significantly.
Therefore, careful implementation decisions are needed that take into account workload requirements and even data handling patterns at the CPU level.
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