Backblaze Q3 2025 Drive Stats: Rethinking Failure, Celebrating High-Capacity Drive Strength

Core Insights - Backblaze released its Q3 2025 Drive Stats report, analyzing the performance and reliability of over 328,000 hard drives, highlighting a quarterly failure rate increase from 1.36% in Q2 to 1.55% in Q3, with an annualized failure rate (AFR) of 1.57% for 2024 [2][3] Drive Performance and Reliability - Four hard drive models achieved zero failures this quarter: Seagate HMS5C4040BLE640 (4TB), Seagate ST8000NM000A (8TB), Toshiba MG09ACA16TE (16TB), and Toshiba MG11ACA24TE (24TB) [2] - High-capacity drives (20TB+) increased by nearly 8,000 units, now representing 21% of the active drive pool, while the lifetime AFR remained steady at 1.31% [3] Failure Analysis Methodology - Backblaze employs SMART monitoring, drive monitoring tools, and automated data enrichment to differentiate between true mechanical failures and temporary removals, classifying a drive as failed if it does not re-enter the active population by the end of the quarter [4] - The outlier Toshiba MG08ACA16TE (16TB) recorded a high AFR of 16.95%, attributed to ongoing upgrades requiring temporary drive removals rather than mechanical issues, with expectations for normalization in future reports [5] Data Transparency and Community Engagement - Backblaze has built one of the largest collections of drive reliability data over more than ten years, inviting global IT and data science communities to analyze and learn from its openly available reliability metrics [2][6]