Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2025

Summary

Every quarter, Drive Stats gives us the numbers. This quarter, it gave us a crisis of meaning. What does it really mean for a hard drive to fail? Is it the moment the lights go out, or the moment we decide they have? Philosophers might call that an ontological gray area. We just call it Q3. As of June 30, 2025, we had 332,915 drives under management. Of that total, there were 3,970 boot drives and 328,348 data drives. Let’s dig into our stats, then talk about the meaning of failure. This quarter, we have more to talk about (Stats-wise) Drive Stats was the beginning. Want to see more of the full picture? Check out the Stats Lab webinar, bringing together content from all of our Stats articles. We’re going to chat about all things Backblaze (and beyond)—by the numbers. Drive Stats: The digest version Q3 2025 hard drive failure rates During Q3 2025, we were tracking 328,348 storage drives. Here are the numbers: Backblaze Hard Drive Failure Rates for Q3 2025 Notes and observations The failure rate has increased: The failure rate has changed, and by quite a bit. As a reminder, last quarter’s AFR was 1.36% compared with this quarter’s 1.55%. (Interestingly, the 2024 yearly AFR was 1.57%.) That new drive energy: Say hello to the 24TB Toshiba MG11ACA24TE, joining the drive pool with 2,400 drives and 24,148 drive days. That means that we’ve hit the thresholds for the quarterly stats, but not the lifetime. The zero failure club: It was a big month for the zero failure club, with four drives making the cut: Seagate HMS5C4040BLE640 (4TB) Seagate ST8000NM000A (8TB) Toshiba MG09ACA16TE (16TB) Toshiba MG11ACA24TE (24TB)—and yes, that’s the new drive. For those of you tracking the stats closely, you’ll notice that the Seagate ST8000NM000A (8TB) is a frequent flier on this list. The last time it had a failure was in Q3 2024—and it was just a single failure for the whole quarter! The highest AFRs were really high: The high end was so high that this month, it inspired us to run an out...