Backblaze 2025 Year-End Drive Stats: Annual AFR Falls To 1.36% As High-Capacity Drives Dominate Fleet
StorageReview, Thursday, February 12th, 2026
Backblaze has now published 13 years of Drive Stats data, one of the most extensive longitudinal datasets on hard drive reliability in production environments. Over time, this dataset has become a valuable reference for understanding drive performance trends across models, capacities, and deployment conditions.
Today, they released the 2025 year-end Drive Stats report, which examines hard drive reliability from three perspectives: Q4 2025 performance, full-year 2025 annualized failure rates, and lifetime failure trends across qualifying drive models. While individual drive results can vary from quarter to quarter, long-term patterns across the fleet provide the most useful context for evaluating reliability.
As of December 31, 2025, Backblaze was monitoring a whopping 341,664 drives used to store data. For the Q4 2025 analysis, 4,013 boot drives and 459 hard drives were excluded because they did not meet the reporting criteria. After these exclusions, 337,192 hard drives remained in the evaluation pool.