Backblaze drive stats for Q2 2026
backblaze.com
backblaze.com
In 2021, Backblaze saw ~14% failure rate at 7 years 9 months. Drive useful life: about 6 years.
That gave us what was a stable-seeming, old "replace drives at 5 years, or you're getting risky" rule of thumb (unless you prefer to replace on failure, of course).
In 2025, Backblaze saw ~5% failure rate at 10 years 3 months. Drive useful life: ~10 years, roughly!
Thanks for all the HDD improvements, industry!
But I think part of it is the modern densities have less tolerance for manufacturing issues, so if the disks work they work well. Kinda like the Mars rovers which only had to work 90 days but they really had to work, so they ended up working for years.
[1]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/a-flood-on-the-diskdrive-market
Backblaze even showed with their statistics that the "bathtub curve" is dead - new drives have a barely lower failure rate than middle-aged drives https://www.backblaze.com/blog/drive-failure-over-time-the-b...
Drives still have a meaningful average working life is what I see in te data. There's just barely any infant mortality left.
This lead to a lot of people doing things like intensive burn-in cycles for a week to test new drives before putting them in their machines.
When there are no longer early deaths (the "left" side of the bathtub), it's just "old things wear out" which doesn't have a special word for it.
The tub has not disappeared, but its shallower and longer.
Pretty crap.
Yup. And most people wouldn't bother but typically you could RMA HDDs: the terms were quite generous. I was in Europe and did learn, as a teenager, how to RMA HDDs to get shiny replacements (IIRC for example for Seagate HDDs I'd send them to the Netherlands and then after a few weeks I'd get a new one by the mail).
There is both the mathematical truth to it, but also the physical/chemical one. If something eg. deformed or had a slight manufacturing mistake the wear will be quicker. If everything works perfectly and eg. there are little vibrations (can be everything from earthquake to noise) then HDDs also tend to live longer and run faster. Of course the shipping process also can take its toll and vary greatly.
I think in the world of computers it's all to easy to forget that things largely aren't binary and "logically perfect". Even with advancements in manufacturing and materials drives are physical things in the real world influenced by many things inside and outside of the manufacturer's and user's control.
And not because it failed, but because I was doing a system overhaul and replaced all my storage with M.2 NVMe drives.
That's not exactly what this means. This is like life expectancy at birth vs life expectancy at current age. (which is the thing where people act like "only kings got old" in the past, when while there is some truth to it also doesn't mean "you would be dead by 30" when you already reached adulthood. The biggest difference we got regarding life expectancy at birth by far was doctors and nurses cleaning their hands, followed by things like vaccines for childhood diseases)
Manufacturing errors are likely to hit early. So replacing a drive means you might replace a perfectly healthy drive with one that will eat your data.
Just use SMART and you have a way better insight of how well your drive does than any such advice.
And also you likely won't run your drives in the same conditions as Backblaze, so things might vary in both directions.
There is shipping, storage, running conditions, series, manufacturing, and many variables. So you have a way better understanding of your drive than what Backblaze can provide if you just look at your drive's SMART data and run a self test.
Likewise with SSDs. Given their slightly more write intensive than ordinary desktop workloads, I'm reasonably confident that the capacitors in my 10-year-old enterprise SSDs (HGST SAS with Intel flash) will fail before the flash.
Could be better controllers, or better driver firmware, or something.
Just curious where in the chain the improvements come from.
Seriously, I had to replace 2 hard drives in my NAS this year like a bad luck lottery and my hard drives have doubled in price. I was terrified that my NVMe was failing as well.
Yeah I'd prefer it to be even cheaper but the prices for HDDs aren't too bad.
When I bought these they were peak GB/$, which is a fair couple of years ago.
But for me hdd prices feel like when people were panicking about crypto going down to prices that hadn't been seen in... days.
Now RAM and GPU prices, yeah. Those are bloody expensive.
It is 2x the price of just 2 years ago, it's too bad.
I usually don't spite people or companies but in this case I hope all these AI slop bullshit machines fail & fail hard.
So that we can get hardware at sane prices for actually useful thing. And to serve as a warning to never ever do such a stupidly disruptive shit ever again.
I think for the folks in the US this was a site that works: https://www.goharddrive.com/default.php
Whereas for those in the EU there's this: https://datablocks.dev/
For the second link, you'll have to ignore the horribly tasteless AI slop image for the site background (someone should e-mail them about it or something), the site itself is legit, bought some drives from them: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/buying-some-drives-from-datablo...
It failed for a reason before, so it will likely fail again before the end of its usual lifecycle.
idk, it was such a traumatic experience for me that I decided to pass on recertified HDDs.
If a single HDD failing is traumatic then you're doing something wrong. At absolute minimum you should be in raid1. Backups should amount to snapshots that can be restored in a single step.
I wasn't storing anything important on it anyway, mostly movies ripped from Blu-rays. So its failure wasn't traumatic. However I expected it to last at least three years, but it died after exactly 365 days of use. The seller refused to send a replacement, and legally speaking, they were in the right.
Better telling everyone not to buy this things. /s
There's one exception to this - HAMR added additional components, and a corresponding increase in BOM cost, but there's probably a learning curve on this.
However the recent AI data center boom is probably hitting HDDs in two ways - (a) general demand for anything datacenter-related, and (b) high DRAM prices, with most HDDs containing 256-512MB of DDR3. (I haven't physically examined the newest drives - they may be DDR4 and go beyond 512MB; also the 40TB supposedly includes NAND flash, adding yet more cost)
How old is your NVMe?
I wonder what the use case for them is, they aren't ideal for RAID as they would take far too long to rebuild the array in a drive failure, but they also aren't great for long term cold storage. Perhaps they are ideal for periodic backups where you want to take a daily 1TB backup of a server or CCTV where you don't really care about backing up the data as it's all deleted on schedule anyway.
Most of the data on my NAS is of that form.
In bigger applications, you have enough redundancy to allow one or two nodes to go down for a while. If a company had terabytes upon terabytes of critical data, having a multi-tiered storage would make sense, even of a full backup restore would take a days.on some tiers.
As for speed it's mainly tied to rpm and the market decided no one wants higher failure rates / lower mtbf for marginal speed gains.
If you need speed and capacity, throw an ssd or two in front of a raid disk array for caching with primocache or whatever.
For instance: 7200 RPM SATA drives have been stuck in the peak-performance realm of between about 250 and 300 megabytes per second for a decade, even though maximum capacity has more than tripled over that time.
Doing the math, you're probably going from 5 to 8-9 platters, so 2.2-2.5 areal density, and a naive square root suggests it should be about 50% faster. So maybe track width is taking a fair share after all?
Though when I look at more sizes, it seems like 12TB drives were also hitting 260MB/s and speed has almost entirely stalled since, with 24TB being only a hair faster.
I keep my important stuff with ZFS raidz2.
It doesn't matter much to me if the overall process of replacing a dead drive can be done in 40 minutes or if it drags out to 40 hours. The storage system is still alive, still available for reading and writing, and still redundant for that entire time. It can take as long as it takes.
My break-glass-in-case-of-emergency offsite backups are done with restic over the network, so I only had to send 1 initial copy. That first copy took quite a long time. But restic is pretty clever about how it handles things; all subsequent daily backups are what might best be described as incremental-ish. They contain only recent changes and are pretty small with the usual churn rate on this particular pile of data.
(This matters because it keeps the cost of keeping it running quite low, which means that backups actually happen instead of being just a good idea. :) )
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I'd probably pick different methods if I had a real budget for this stuff, but even then: Why would I be motivated to care about how long it takes to replace a hard drive?
So move the bar up to raidz3 or the equivalent? This adds cost, of course, but enhancing redundancy isn't free.
It was something I kept in-mind when I made the decision to use raidz2 for my own purposes: It tolerates two concurrent drive failures before local data loss happens, which I feel is acceptable for my purposes. raidz3 moves that tolerance to three concurrent drive failures.
I mean: What's the alternative for storing X amount of data? A greater number of relatively small drives? That's expensive in its own ways, too.
And adding complexity in that way tends to nosedive metrics like MTBF: If a system relies upon one widget and this system has an MTBF of n, then a system that relies upon two such widgets has an MTBF of n/2.
If the drives all have the same failure rate, then: A system with raidz2 and 10x 10TB drives will tend experience more disk failures than a system with raidz2 and 6x 20TB drives. Both systems can store ~80TB of data, but the one with 10TB drives has a worse ratio of redundancy and includes more parts that will eventually fail.
KISS, etc. :)
> and the longer it takes the more likely another drive will fail during that time.
You mean the old light-weight RAID-5-esque fear? A drive fails and redundancy drops to zero. So the failed drive is replaced or the hot spare is rotated in (or whatever), and the rebuild process begins. Another drive crashes during the rebuild because of the stress of actually-being-read and now the data on the array is presumed to be trash.
That process seems to actually work more like this: Old data that hasn't been read for years finally gets accessed (because RAID rebuild), and that's when some other drive starts reporting errors. But those errors were already there; they just weren't detected until it was way too late.
It doesn't really seem to work that way with filesystems like ZFS. The contents, whether old and stale or brand new, can (and should) be read routinely and checksummed to confirm integrity as part of a regularly-performed scrub.
The weak drives that can't stand to be read will be discovered during this read-only exercise, but they were already dead. We just didn't know it until we ran a scrub. So we scrub early, and often.
That's the same as with RAID, except: With RAID, the same disk still dies in the same way. We just don't know it was dead until a recovery is in-process. RAID, as commonly practiced, can therefore function as a problem-multiplier in ways that other systems can avoid.
Especially now that the same 4TB NVMe SSDs I was buying for $300 are now selling for over $1,000.
In my case, the source of the data is S3, so there's no need for redundancy, as the hard drive is effectively a local cache for cloud storage and the work isn't nearly so time-critical that an occasional failure would be more than a mild annoyance to a customer, if that.
Same for archival backups. Faster recovery time than Glacier Deep Archive, less cost over a period of years, simpler and less expensive than tape for modest volume.
I guess if you have it all backed up in S3 it's fine, but if you put this thing in a NAS and one drive dies, your NAS is going to spend the whole week rebuilding where it's running at 100%, and another drive dying during this means data loss.
If the cluster as whole can stomach the drive failures without losing data and is overall fast enough, there is no need to run many small drives where running fewer big drives is cheaper.
Every application will have different trade offs
I’ve got a Synology that’s mostly full of 20TB drives. As you say, adding a drive takes about a week. Expanding the array is even longer.
Why am I reading the very newest Backblaze drive report -- they fired the over-forty engineer who started this, apparently.. and I as a consumer, cannot buy the same drives that might be listed there -- have not looked yet. The entire situation is fundementally changed. Info welcome
*AFR%-wise
One failed drive was replaced with the same model, which doesn’t inspire much confidence. The other couldn’t be replaced, so I received a refund of the original €198 purchase price from 1.5 years ago. The exact same 6TB drive now costs around €340, a pretty steep increase. For the second drive I went with Seagate, fingers crossed.
There’re still a couple of years left on my personal boycott timer before I’ll risk trusting them again. Every manufacturer has a bad batch sometimes, but that was egregious lying to customers.
Sounds like you got scammed. The refund should be for the same or similar value today, not 60% of that. Basically they made 40% profit off of selling your replacement drive instead of giving it to you.
https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/smr-what-we-learned-in-o...
I assume heat. I have one of the fastest 2tb usb sticks you can get and it gets super hot in the aluminum case its in and that drive only lasted me a year. My tiny little 2tb only-used-for-time-machine drive i bought with my m1 max died years ago. I have a $1200 (now) msrp 4tb wd black i used for a month before it completely died. I don't think i have a single working usb stick right now out of probably 5 of them.
I have 4-6 samsung 970-990 pros none of those have died.
With this degree of average age variability they can't compare failure rates.
They should show us Kaplan-Meier (survival) curves not failure in this quarter.
Unless they set some datacenter on fire, not much in Q2 should be different vs Q1 for the same hard drive other than it being older.
Sure, internally, I'd do a better analysis controlled for age that shows if there are common failure rate increases but here they focus on model failure rates which is completely confounded by age differences.
> We're giving you this data for free and providing a brief summary of what you should expect to see in it. We do not get paid to teach our readers advanced statistics, nor is that what we want to do. We encourage you to take the raw data and explain to people how you think it should be analysed.
which seems like a fair response. I'm very, very grateful that they release the data freely the way they do. It reflects well on them and more companies should do that.
What else is there to do?
They're cool, but I don't bother anymore - usually when I need neodymium magnets I need a specific size or shape anyway.
"That question is becoming more relevant as higher-capacity drives become more (dare we say) load bearing."
Critics of this line of worrying tend to fall into the same category of irrationality/bias as the "just be yourself" advice-givers.