Backblaze Drive Stats for Q1 2026

Long time readers: I must start with a mea culpa that this article was not released on our traditional May the Fourth (or thereabouts) report date. Please know I missed making the many and sundry Star Wars puns as much as (I’m sure) you missed hearing them—so, I’ll probably slip a few in, just because.

That said, there was good reason for the delay. We were diligently investigating a disturbance in the force. (See? We’re back!) We’ll get into the details after we dig into the numbers, but here’s the teaser: this quarter, we observed something unusual in the data that wasn’t entirely a failure trend. It did, however, prompt us to revisit and validate the assumptions behind our Drive Stats analysis before publishing.

Sign up for the Drive Stats webinar<br>Ready to dive deeper into the data? Tune in Wednesday, July 15, 2026 at 12:00 noon PT, as Sr. Market Intelligence Manager, Stephanie Doyle, and Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Laquie Campbell review the trends.<br>Join the Webinar

Q1 2026 Hard drive failure rates

As of the end of Q1 2026, Backblaze was monitoring 345,662 drives used to store data. For our evaluation, we removed from consideration 3,907 boot drives and 492 hard drives, as they did not meet the criteria to be included. We’ll discuss the criteria we used in the next section of this report. Removing these drives leaves us with 341,263 hard drives to analyze. The table below shows the annualized failure rates for Q1 2026 for this collection of drives.

Backblaze Hard Drive Failure Rates for Q1 2026

Reporting period January 1, 2026–March 31, 2026 inclusive<br>Drive models with drive count > 100 and drive days > 10,000 as of March 31, 2026 in Q1 2026.

MFGModelSize (TB) Drive CountAvg. Age (Months)Drive DaysDrive FailuresAFR (%)

HGSTHUH728080ALE60081,02687.83,252,0521251.4

HGSTHUH721212ALE600122,60874.56,115,4131040.62

HGSTHUH721212ALE6041213,2775524,018,9621,1141.69

HGSTHUH721212ALN604129,78077.426,914,7951,6782.28

SeagateST8000DM00288,910105.533,115,8361,3801.52

SeagateST8000NM0055813,23294.645,131,4142,4041.94

SeagateST10000NM00861098189.93,566,7163063.13

SeagateST12000NM00071298331.637,325,7242,2972.25

SeagateST12000NM00081218,65067.243,012,8202,4662.09

SeagateST12000NM000J121,08718.6632,857221.27

SeagateST12000NM001G1213,21659.525,106,7156790.99

SeagateST14000NM001G1410,51958.420,025,9097561.38

SeagateST14000NM0138141,25153.82,767,6544385.78

SeagateST16000NM001G1634,72940.744,065,0628200.68

SeagateST24000NM002H249,6059.32,779,1002202.89

ToshibaMG07ACA14TA1437,26362.675,018,0842,1141.03

ToshibaMG07ACA14TEY1499638.41,235,801581.71

ToshibaMG08ACA16TA1640,03630.437,906,4461,1131.07

ToshibaMG08ACA16TE166,26447.69,544,6913251.24

ToshibaMG08ACA16TEY164,88549.48,035,7805192.36

ToshibaMG09ACA16TE165066.5101,38341.44

ToshibaMG10ACA20TE2020,45111.57,206,9031370.69

ToshibaMG11ACA24TE247,2034869,474100.42

WDCWUH721414ALE6L4148,64060.616,344,0312310.52

WDCWUH721816ALE6L0162,994504,665,4171331.04

WDCWUH721816ALE6L41626,80134.428,463,2143940.51

WDCWUH722222ALE6L42245,63816.122,472,0503600.58

WDCWUH722626ALE6L4263,6042.5274,16150.67

Totals 529,968,46420,2121.39

Note and observations

The quarterly AFR is 1.24%. This is up from last quarter, but down from the previous year.

No new drive models this quarter. That’s not unheard of, but it’s pretty rare. In the last eight quarters, we’ve had new drives six times.

The investment in higher capacity drives continues. We deployed 10,220 drives last quarter, and 9,404 of those drives had a capacity of more than 20TB. While these drives are still fairly young, their AFR is an impressive 0.85% as a pool.

Impressive, most impressive. These drives had zero failures:

HGST HMS5C4040BLE640 (4TB)

HGST HUH728080ALE600 (8TB)

Seagate ST16000NM002J (16TB)

And these drives had one:

Seagate ST8000NM000A (8TB)

Seagate ST12000NM000J (12TB)

Seagate ST14000NM000J (14TB)

Seagate ST16000NM000J (16TB)

Toshiba MG09ACA16TE (16TB)

That list proves a point we’ve made in a few different quarters: net failure does not necessarily mean a low AFR. On this list, the Seagate ST16000NM000J (16TB) came in with a 3.61% AFR—when there are only 129 drives left in the fleet, even one failure spikes the AFR.

These aren’t the drives you’re looking for

As mentioned, we remove drives that don’t meet our criteria. We’ve covered the reasons that we’ve designed these exclusions in past reports, but here’s the quick and dirty:

PeriodDrive CountDrive Days

Quarterly > 100> 10,000

Annual > 250> 50,000

Lifetime > 500>100,000

Regardless of whether or not a given drive model is included in this article’s charts and tables, all of the line item data is included in our Drive Stats dataset which you can download by visiting our Drive Stats page.

Lifetime hard drive failure rates

Now let’s look at the lifetime failure rates. A reminder that

Backblaze Lifetime Hard Drive Failure Rates

Reporting period January 1, 2026–March 31, 2026...