Backblaze published its disk drive annual failure rates (AFRs) for Q1 2025, noting that the quarterly failure rate went up from 1.35 to 1.42 percent.
The cloud storage company was tracking 317,833 drives across models that had more than 100 drives in operation as of March 31, and that collectively logged over 10,000 drive-days during the quarter. The supplier/model AFRs were:
We sorted this table by ascending AFR and then graphed it on that basis:
Seagate has three of the top four AFR spots.
Backblaze noted that the four higher-end outlier AFRs, which contributed to the rise in overall AFR from the previous quarter, were:
- Seagate 10 TB (model ST10000NM0086). Q4 2024: 5.72 percent. Q1 2025: 4.72 percent.
- HGST 12 TB (model HUH721212ALN604). Q4 2024: 5.15 percent. Q1 2025: 4.97 percent.
- Seagate 14 TB (model ST14000NM0138). Q4 2024: 5.95 percent. Q1 2025: 6.82 percent.
- Seagate 12 TB (model ST12000NM0007). Q4 2024: 8.72 percent. Q1 2025: 9.47 percent.
Four drive models had zero failures in the quarter: the 4 TB HGST (model HMS5C4040ALE640), the Seagate 8 TB (model ST8000NM000A), the Seagate 12 TB (model ST12000NM000J), the and Seagate 14TB (model ST14000NM000J).
Overall, Backblaze’s “4 TB drives showed wonderfully low failure rates, with yet another quarter of zero failures from (HGST) model HMS5C4040ALE640 and 0.34 percent AFR from model (HGST) HMS5C4040BLE640.”
It also tracks lifetime AFRs and the only drive with a more than 2.85 percent AFR is Seagate’s 14 TB (ST14000NM0138) at 5.97 percent for 1,322 drives. But a second 14 TB Seagate drive model, the ST14000NM001G, with 33,817 drives in operation, has a much lower 1.42 percent AFR – problem sorted.
Backblaze has ported its drive AFR stats to Snowflake. Previously it was running SQL queries against CSV data imported into a MySQL instance running on a laptop. The team notes: “The migration to Snowflake saved us a ton of time and manual data cleanup … Gone are the days of us bugging folks for exports that take hours to process! We can run lightweight queries against a cached, structured table.”
The company says that “the complete dataset used to create the tables and charts in this report is available on our Hard Drive Test Data page. You can download and use this data for free for your own purpose,” with the following provisos: “1) cite Backblaze as the source if you use the data, 2) you accept that you are solely responsible for how you use the data, and 3) you do not sell this data itself to anyone; it is free.”
