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, 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.

Actually, do these results suggest that maybe we should reconsider HDDs, especially now that SSD prices are getting silly? Well, maybe. But it's tricky. More reliable HDDs would certainly help their appeal versus SSDs. Not that SSDs are perfect, but I'd wager total drive failures are now much less common in this SSD age than the HDD era. That must be especially true for laptop PCs that get more of a physical beating.

There's the performance angle, too, of course. I reported recently that WD has recently been bigging up some new HDD tech it promises to give drives "flash-like" performance. But that's probably only for fairly narrow sequential performance metrics, not random access. Even then, that tech isn't actually available today, and it's not clear when it will hit the market.

Arguably, making all that moot is another WD announcement, namely that it has essentially sold out of HDDs for the whole of 2026. "We're pretty much sold out for calendar 2026," Western Digital's CEO Irving Tan says. Oh, great.

WD says that Tan shared that most of its production for 2026 has been allocated to its "top seven customers." One assumes the Venn diagram of those seven WD customers and the so-called Magnificent Seven tech companies has a fair old bit of overlap.

In other words, WD's production for 2026 seems to have been inhaled by AI server farms. Three of the seven have also booked up a chunk of WD's production for 2027 and 2028, too. Joy.

Oh, and get this. Consumer HDDs account for just 5% of WD's revenues. Now, a lot of that is no doubt down to the fact that most PCs have shifted away from HDDs in favour of SSDs. And WD isn't big in SSDs.

But, still, the overall narrative here remains depressingly familiar. We're looking at HDDs being hoovered up by AI, too. So, if you thought snagging a cheap HDD as an interim solution if SSD prices get even worse, AI is way ahead of you and plans to spoil that idea, too. Hey ho.