Old school hard drives are getting more reliable according to a new survey but good luck buying one later this year thanks to AI demand

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...