February 13, 2026
Spinning plots, not just disks
Backblaze Drive Stats for 2025
Seagate shade, lace jokes, and a 26TB rookie: the drive drama fans asked for
TLDR: Backblaze’s 2025 report shows mostly steady hard drive reliability, a suspicious old HGST cluster likely due to vibration, and a once-spiky Toshiba model calming after firmware tweaks. Comments explode into Seagate-blame vs. environment-defense, while rising SSD prices reignite the “hard drives aren’t dead” debate for budgets and backups.
Backblaze just dropped its 13-year “Drive Stats” recap and the internet grabbed the popcorn. The company played with a “lace anniversary” metaphor, and commenters instantly turned it into memes about “delicate data doilies.” The vibe: unlucky 13? More like lucky stats—if you’re not a Seagate stan. The post covers Q4 2025 and lifetime trends, and fans are already RSVP’ing to their Drive Stats webinar to argue in real time.
The headline numbers became instant ammo. Backblaze analyzed 337,192 drives after removing boot drives. The “honor roll” sparked cheers and side-eye: a Seagate 8TB with zero failures (plot twist!), a 26TB Western Digital newbie with just one fail, and an older 8TB HGST model showing a scary double-digit failure cluster—Backblaze suspects vibration in that specific data center pod, not a brand-wide curse. Meanwhile, a 16TB Toshiba that freaked folks out last quarter (16.95% fail rate) looks calmer after routine firmware work—still a bit high, but trending better.
Cue the comment cage match. One camp dusted off the greatest hit—“Seagate fails more”—while others pushed back, saying environment and sample quirks matter more than brand wars. A second thread lit up over SSDs vs. hard drives after flash prices shot up, with doomsayers predicting HDD’s comeback tour and pragmatists asking how this changes Backblaze’s bottom line. And yes, the “Drive Stats isn’t a situationship” line got remixed into relationship memes—“commit to your data,” they say, “and bring lace to the webinar.”
Key Points
- •Backblaze monitored 341,664 drives by end of 2025 and analyzed 337,192 HDDs for Q4 2025 after excluding 4,013 boot drives and 459 drives that didn’t meet criteria.
- •Q4 2025 model highlights included zero failures for Seagate ST8000NM000A 8TB and ST16000NM002J 16TB; single failures were recorded for several other HGST, Seagate, and WDC models.
- •An 8TB HGST cohort (~1,073 drives, ~7.5 years old) showed a double-digit AFR; temperature was ruled out and vibration sensitivity is suspected, with drives flagged for standard migration.
- •A 16TB Toshiba model previously showed a 16.95% AFR; after routine firmware work with Toshiba, Backblaze expected normalization, with rates still somewhat elevated in Q4.
- •Backblaze announced a webinar to review 2025 annualized failure rates, trends, and fleet updates.