Hard Drive Reliability Has Improved — Backblaze Statistics Shows the Best and Worst HDDs for 2024

Cloud storage provider Backblaze has released a report on hard drive failure statistics for Q4 and for the full year of 2024. The average annual failure rate (AFR) across all drives in the company’s inventory was 1.35% in the past quarter.

Image source: backblaze.com

Backblaze had 301,120 hard drives in service at the end of 2024. The worst performers in Q4, with AFRs over 4.5%, were one 12TB HGST model (HUH7212ALN604) and three Seagate models of 10, 12, and 14TB (ST10000NM0086, ST12000NM0007, and ST14000NM0138, respectively).

Five hard drive models did not show any failures at all in the past quarter: the 4 TB HGST (HMS5C4040ALE640), as well as the Seagate ST8000NM000A, ST14000NM000J, ST16000NM002J and ST24000NM002H with 8, 14, 16 and 24 TB, respectively.

The 12TB Seagate ST12000NM0007 had the worst AFR in both Q4 and 2024. Seagate’s 10TB (ST10000NM0086) and 14TB (ST14000NM0138) drives, as well as HGST’s 12TB (HUH7212ALN604), all had high failure rates for the year. No drive achieved zero failures for the full year, but the 16TB Seagate (ST16000NM002J) came closest, with only one failure in Q3, resulting in an AFR of 0.22% for 2024.

The average AFR for 2024 was 1.57%, an improvement over 2023 (1.7%), and is expected to improve in 2025.

In 2024, Backblaze installed 53,337 hard drives, an average of 26 drives per hour per technician. In terms of capacity, the 10TB drives had the highest AFR, followed by 12TB and 8TB. ​​The company noted that the latter two drives are between five and eight years old, so their overall failure rates should increase over time.

57% of all drives in use are 14TB and 16TB models. On average, they are two to four years old—these drives are in their prime, so they have consistently low failure rates.

Among all the manufacturers in the Backblaze fleet, HGST had the worst AFR, followed by Seagate, then Toshiba, and Western Digital models were again the most reliable drives. HGST’s high failure rate is due to one 12 TB model. If we exclude it from the statistics, HGST’s AFR is 0.55% – lower than Western Digital’s.