Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2025
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thoughtful
Sentiment
neutral
Category
tech
Key topics
storage
reliability
data analysis
Backblaze released their quarterly drive stats for Q3 2025, providing insights into drive reliability and failure rates.
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11/14/2025, 1:10:19 PM
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I miss this culture and I admire leadership that allows it to not only exist, but thrive. I fear the day a stockholder meeting occurs and someone wringing their hands see the decommissioned pennies they can save by limiting or stopping these reports.
That said, all it would take is for the wrong leadership to start cutting corners to undo all of this hard work.
The Backblaze stock has taken a beating over the years. Recently I saw some news that there were issues with financial reporting (and fraud?). So it’s anybody’s guess as to what may happen or if the company would even be around (as it exists now) in the next decade.
I’d guess they may already have tools in place to prepare the stats and charts, leaving some amount of writing as manual work (which could or would probably be offloaded to generative AI). But analyzing the reliability of drives and publishing the data could also be seen as a competitive advantage when comparing with newer companies (positive and negative).
(As an anecdotal example -- I first heard about Backblaze from these reports many years ago and have relied on them to an extent in selecting new drives. I'm now a Backblaze customer.)
Hopefully not, given the performance one was just newly added!
These are HDDs.
Not even two days ago there as a article of backlog on HDDs for AI. Because everybody and their grandmother wants to store the entire internet, out of fear that AI scraping will become more difficult. Aka, they are gating data. And yes, you can train AI easily on HDD even with their lower IOPS. The fact that you got a few 1000 in parallel does the trick, and its often bandwidth issues that hit harder.
I just stockpiled a few extra 4TB NVME because i learned my lesson. NVME has not been dropping in prices after the manufacture pushed it up, and AI is going to keep eating NVME storage for a long time. Let alone HDD storage...
Welcome to the new normal ... Crypto miners killing GPU prices, HDD Crypto miners, Crypto miners again back with a vengeance, O pandemic, everybody needs hardware... Short time of benefits because of over production (on NVME especially, manufacture cut back production) AAAAND .. here comes AI.
Its something every fying year.
The skus with the lowest number immediately get bought out(if they are still available, which they are not always) and will never be available. You also always run the risk of "getting a bad batch" or just getting some drives that got beat up in shipping.
Usually this data is only useful for keeping an eye on your own stuff and prioritizing replacements when the time comes.
When buying drives I just look at the sizes I need and the performance then get 1/3rd from each of the manufacturers.
All the same, it's definitely cool and interesting to see. I've had some good and some very bad luck with storage drives over the years. I still think twice about Seagate drives since I had 6 out of 8 of their 3tb enterprise models go bad relatively quickly a decade and a half ago, specifically bought through separate vendors. I also had the first IBM Deskstar drives, the second died before the first could be RMA'd (raid1 isn't backup).
Reports like this might help drive planning for failures. It might also help validate your experience if you've had a bunch of failures with some model and they have too.
IIRC, there have been a couple models that seemed to hit a big bathtub curve style end of life (I think 6TB drives in particularl); that could be a pre-failure indicator for you if you have that model.
Otherwise, yeah, mostly not actionable, but very nice to see the data.
> When buying drives I just look at the sizes I need and the performance then get 1/3rd from each of the manufacturers.
This is a good plan, you should avoid most correlated failures from firmware and manufacturing (although there's a lot of shared supply chain, so you might not avoid all correlated failures if some common component was made improperly during a long enough time period that all three drive makers would be using it in your purchase).
A great model has a MTBF of 250 years.
A bad model might have a MTBF of just 5 years.
I suspect if you had a need for reliable storage which couldn't be met with the usual RAID approach, buying 2nd hand drives from eBay of a model and batch proven to be really reliable is probably your best bet.
Every drive failure will lead to an unhappy customer and product return, so you really want the failure rate in the first 10 years of operation to be 1% or below. (Which none of the drives in this study can do).
Backblaze changed IO patterns with B2, but that would be the key data for me to make this more useful: failure rate as a percentage of bytes read/written, etc.
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