November 14, 2025
Zero Fail vs Doom Drives
Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2025
Zero-fail heroes, 17% lemons, and a comment section meltdown
TLDR: Backblaze’s Q3 drive failures rose to 1.55%, with a few “zero-fail” winners and outliers hitting almost 17%. Comments split between praising rare transparency, claiming the data isn’t buyer-friendly, and fretting about hyperscaler-driven shortages—plus cheeky 250-year-drive jokes and eBay hunting strategies.
Backblaze dropped its Q3 hard drive scorecard and the comments lit up like a data center at midnight. The headline stat: the failure rate (AFR—annualized failure rate) ticked up from 1.36% to 1.55%. Cue drama. Four models joined the zero failure club—including a brand-new 24TB Toshiba—while three outliers freaked everyone out, with one Toshiba model spiking to nearly 17% failures. That’s chaos math for a lot of storage nerds. Some cheered the transparency: basilgohar called the report “so underrated,” praising free, real-world numbers few companies share. Others rolled their eyes. tempest_ said the data “isn’t usually very actionable,” griping that the good models disappear fast and you might still get a “bad batch.” redm argued Backblaze’s backup-heavy workload is unlike typical use, so don’t blindly copy their shopping list. Meanwhile, blindriver tossed in a plot twist—an impending “2 year enterprise data shortage” thanks to hyperscalers—sparking speculation about prices and availability. And londons_explore brought meme fuel: “A great model has a MTBF of 250 years” (MTBF = average time between failures), inspiring eBay treasure-hunt jokes and “zero-fail club” badge memes. Philosophy corner? Commenters joked about Schrödinger’s hard drive: is a drive dead, or only when Backblaze says it is?
Key Points
- •Backblaze tracked 328,348 data drives in Q3 2025 (reporting period July 1–September 30, 2025), with inclusion criteria of >100 drives and >10,000 drive days per model.
- •The quarterly AFR rose to 1.55%, up from 1.36% in the prior quarter; the 2024 yearly AFR was 1.57%.
- •A new 24TB model, Toshiba MG11ACA24TE, entered tracking with 2,400 drives and 24,148 drive days and recorded zero failures.
- •Four models had zero failures: Seagate HMS5C4040BLE640 (4TB), Seagate ST8000NM000A (8TB), Toshiba MG09ACA16TE (16TB), Toshiba MG11ACA24TE (24TB).
- •Outlier analysis (Tukey method) flagged models with AFR >5.88%: Seagate ST10000NM0086 (7.97%), Seagate ST14000NM0138 (6.86%), and Toshiba MG08ACA16TEY (16.95%).