Backblaze Publishes Q1 2025 Drive Stats Report Highlighting Hard Drive Reliability Trends
Over 317,000 drives analyzed; four models recorded zero failures; high-capacity drives (20TB+) outperform average.
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SAN MATEO, Calif. — Backblaze, Inc. (Nasdaq: BLZE), the cloud storage innovator providing a modern alternative to traditional cloud providers, last week published its Q1 2025 Drive Stats report, offering detailed analysis on the performance and reliability of 317,833 hard drives which underpin its cloud storage offerings and are deployed in its global data centers and represent over four exabytes of data under management.
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Trusted by IT leaders and storage professionals since 2013, this latest installment in Backblaze's long-running cloud infrastructure quarterly series reveals key reliability insights across manufacturers, models, and drive capacities. Significant findings include the four drive models with zero failures this quarter, notable patterns in high-capacity drive reliability, and important failure trend data for drives reaching the five-year operational milestone.
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Leveraging our own Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage solution in conjunction with data analysis tools, Snowflake and Trino, we were able to implement a new process of optimizing data collection and analytics. That allowed us to run lightweight queries against cached, structured tables—showcasing a great use-case for the combination of those three services.
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'As a leading cloud storage company, Backblaze has over 300,000 hard drives supporting over four exabytes of customer data. We aim to help companies and individuals worldwide with their storage needs, and I'm proud of our team for sharing insights we've learned over nearly two decades of managing data,' said Gleb Budman, CEO at Backblaze.
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The latest report includes detailed annualized failure rate (AFR) statistics for 26 drive models, with the overall quarterly failure rate increasing slightly from 1.35% to 1.42%. Notable findings include four models achieving zero failures this quarter, including a 4TB HGST drive and three Seagate models (8TB, 12TB, and 14TB). Meanwhile, higher-capacity drives (20TB+) are performing well with a combined AFR of 0.72%, lower than the overall fleet average—though all drives in that population are well under a year old.
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All data featured in the report is freely available for download as raw files on the Backblaze Hard Drive Test Data page, allowing other cloud storage and IT professionals and researchers to perform their own analyses. Since beginning these quarterly reports in 2013, Backblaze has established the industry's largest publicly accessible dataset on hard drive reliability, covering over 450 billion drive days of operation.
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