Gaming: Old School Hard Drives Are Getting More Reliable According To A New...

1.36% overall HDD failure rate reported as one drive maker says it's sold out for 2026.

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Backblaze has published its latest HDD reliability report for 2025 (via Businesswire) and the good news is that old school hard drives are getting more reliable. The bad news? HDD maker WD has announced that it's basically sold out for 2026, thanks to, oh yes, AI.

Backblaze's report analyses fully 344,196 hard drives across 30 different drive models from WD, HGST, Toshiba and Seagate. The overall failure rate of the drives for 2025 was 1.36%, down from 1.55% in 2024. These are HDDs sitting in a cloud server environment, and so presumably getting a harder 24/7 hammering than you might expect for your typical PC HDD, not that all too many desktop PCs run HDDs these days.

Source: PC Gamer