// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Backblaze drive stats for Q2 2026
September 29, 2026
by
Stephanie Doyle
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Running a storage cloud means serving as both builder and building inspector. You choose the materials, put them to work at scale, and return quarter after quarter to see how the structure is holding up. After 13+ years of publishing Drive Stats, we know the materials in this particular house pretty well. So, when our preferred home improvement store introduces a new and improved brick (so to speak) we want to understand how it fits into the build.
That question is becoming more relevant as higher-capacity drives become more (dare we say) load bearing. We’ve already been tracking the performance of drives at 20TB and above as a group; later in this installment of Drive Stats, we’ll talk about some of the differences between our current building blocks (CMR HDDs) and the new bricks. But first, to take this extended pun to its inevitable conclusion, the inspection (a.k.a. The Stats).
This Q2 2026 Drive Stats report begins with the latest walkthrough: the quarter’s annualized failure rates, the models that stood out, and the lifetime record of the fleet. Then, we’ll look at some of the emerging technologies that could shape the next phase of construction.
Throughout Q2 2026, Backblaze monitored 359,101 drives used to store data. For our evaluation, we removed from consideration 3,881 boot drives and 705 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 354,415 hard drives to analyze. The table below shows the annualized failure rates for Q1 2026 for this collection of drives.
Reporting period April 1, 2026–June 30, 2026 inclusiveDrive models with drive count > 100 and drive days > 10,000 as of June 30, 2026 in Q2 2026.
No typos here, folks: that’s a clean sweep by Seagate.
This quarter we had three outliers, which, according to a quartile analysis, defines an outlier as an AFR above 6.95%. Those drives are:
Each of these drives have some pretty clear reasons for high failure rates. The HGST drive is nearly seven years old, and the 10TB Seagate was nearly 8.5 years old.
Meanwhile, both the Seagate drives have a pretty low drive count—the 10TB drive only has 965; whereas the 14TB has 1,235. That means that while they only had 22 and 25 failures (respectively) their AFRs were quite high.