Backblaze just released its annual drive reliability report, with the company calculating an overall annualized failure rate (AFR) of 1.36% for 2025. According to the company page, its drives ran for a total of 115,638,676 cumulative days, with 4,317 units failing. This data comes from a total of 344,196 drives, meaning it has a good sample size that can give us a relatively accurate view of the reliability of the drives that it uses. The 1.36% AFR is the company’s best result since 2022, improving on 2025’s 1.57% AFR and the 1.70% AFR from the year before that.
Unfortunately, all the drive models that the company used suffered from failures. Two units stood out with only one failure each for the entire year — the Seagate ST16000NM002J 16TB and the Western Digital WUH722626ALE6L4 26TB, although the latter has only been used for one quarter. The Toshiba MGO9ACA16TE 16TB takes the third place with only three failures, followed by the Seagate ST12000NM000J 12TB and the HGST HMS5C4040BLE640 4TB, which had four and five failures, respectively.
We also don’t have a list of red-flagged drives for the entire year, but Backblaze reported three notable models that had high failure rates for the fourth quarter of 2025 — the HGST HUH728080ALE600 8TB (10.29%), the Seagate ST10000NM0086 10TB (5.23%), and the Toshiba MG08ACA16TEY 16TB (4.14%).
The company investigated the reason for HGST’s double-digit failure rate, which was a first for that particular drive. It has ruled out temperature or airflow changes, and the current thought is that it has been affected by vibration. But given that these drives are about 7.5 years old, Backblaze decided to earmark them for retirement. On the other hand, the Toshiba’s 4.14% failure rate is already an improvement over the reported 16.95% from the previous quarter, which has already been addressed via a firmware update. Although this is still a bit high, it’s expected to continue normalizing as the new firmware is rolls out.
Despite that, Backblaze says that drive technology has improved over the years, and that capacity is continuously increasing while cost per GB is dropping — at least before the memory chip and storage shortage that begun in late 2025. While hard drives are still cheaper the RAM and SSDs, they’ve have surged by around 46%, with the Seagate Barracuda 24TB now priced at around $500.
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