Backblaze Publishes Q2 2026 Drive Stats: Quarterly Failure Rate Rises to 1.73%
StorageNewsletter, Thursday, October 8th, 2026
Backblaze's Q2 2026 Drive Stats shows annualized failure rate rising to 1.73% from 1.24%, as 20TB+ drives top a quarter of its fleet.
Backblaze's Q2 2026 Drive Stats report, now in its 13th year, analyzes more than 350,000 production hard drives and shows the quarterly annualized failure rate rising to 1.73%, the highest in some time and up from 1.24% in Q1, while lifetime AFR edged up to 1.41%.
Three models exceeded the 6.95% outlier threshold, two of them very old and two of them Seagate models with small populations.
Drives of 20TB and larger now make up over a quarter of the fleet, no new models were added for a second quarter, and two long-serving HGST models were fully retired.