Cloud storage company releases its 2025 hard drive reliability report — overall Annualized Failure Rate drops to 1.36%, 21 percentage points lower than last year

Source: Tom’s Hardware

Image credit: Western Digital

Backblaze just released its annual drive reliability report, calculating an overall annualized failure rate (AFR) of 1.36 % for 2025. According to the company page, its drives logged a total of 115,638,676 cumulative days, with 4,317 units failing. The data comes from 344,196 drives, providing a solid sample size for assessing the reliability of the drives Backblaze uses. The 1.36 % AFR is the company’s best result since 2022, improving on 2024’s 1.57 % AFR and the 1.70 % AFR from the year before that.

Image credit: Backblaze

Image credit: Backblaze

Notable High‑Failure Models (Q4 2025)

Backblaze highlighted three models with elevated failure rates in the fourth quarter of 2025:

• HGST HUH728080ALE600 8 TB – 10.29 %
• Seagate ST10000NM0086 10 TB – 5.23 %
• Toshiba MG08ACA16TEY 16 TB – 4.14 %

HGST HUH728080ALE600 8 TB

The double‑digit failure rate for this drive was a first for the model. Backblaze ruled out temperature or airflow issues; the current hypothesis points to vibration. Given that these drives are about 7.5 years old, Backblaze plans to retire them.

Toshiba MG08ACA16TEY 16 TB

The 4.14 % failure rate marks a significant improvement over the 16.95 % reported in the previous quarter. Backblaze addressed the issue with a firmware update, and the failure rate is expected to continue normalizing as the update rolls out.

Drive Technology Trends

Backblaze notes that drive technology has improved over the years, with capacity continuously increasing while cost per GB declines—at least before the memory chip and storage shortage that began in late 2025. Although hard drives remain cheaper than RAM and SSDs, prices have surged by around 46 %, exemplified by the Seagate Barracuda 24 TB now priced at roughly $500 (source).