Backblaze Publishes Q2 2026 Drive Stats: Quarterly Failure Rate Rises to 1.73%

No SMR drives are in the fleet today; Backblaze plans to report their failure rates if it adds them.

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Report examines model-level outliers, the retirement of two long-serving drive models, and the growing share of 20TB+ drives

SAN MATEO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Backblaze, Inc. (Nasdaq: BLZE), the high-performance capacity storage layer for AI, today published its Q2 2026 Drive Stats report. Now in its thirteenth year, Drive Stats analyzes more than 350,000 production hard drives across Backblaze's global storage cloud, making it the industry's largest publicly available dataset on drive reliability.

Drives 20TB and larger now make up more than a quarter of Backblaze's fleet, as new deployments continue to concentrate at the high end of the capacity range. No new drive models entered the fleet for the second quarter in a row, and two of Backblaze's longest-serving models, the 4TB HGST HMS5C4040BLE640 and the 8TB HGST HUH728080ALE600, were fully retired.

“Enabling AI workloads to run efficiently requires optimal utilization of massive storage. As we run one of the world's largest storage clouds, this gives us real-world insights into drive reliability that we're able to share and help companies on the forefront of AI development. This quarter, we focus on larger capacity drives,” said Gleb Budman, CEO, Backblaze.

Key Findings from the Q2 2026 Drive Stats Report:

• Quarterly AFR rises. Quarterly AFR rises. The Q2 2026 annualized failure rate (AFR) was 1.73%, the highest in some time and up from 1.24% in Q1 2026. Three drive models exceeded the report's outlier threshold of 6.95% AFR. Two of the three were older models (one nearly seven years old and another nearly eight and a half) and two models (both Seagate) had relatively small populations, where a modest number of failures produces a high AFR. The lifetime AFR held consistent, ticking up slightly to 1.41%.
• A clean sweep for Seagate. Every drive model with zero or one failure this quarter was a Seagate:
  • Seagate ST8000NM000A 8TB – 0 failures out of 239 drives
  • Seagate ST12000NM000J 12TB – 0 failures out of 1,079 drives
  • Seagate ST14000NM000J 14TB – 0 failures out of 497 drives
  • Seagate ST16000NM000J 16TB – 1 failure out of 171 drives

"The drives we retired this quarter put in close to a decade of service each, which says a lot about how long well-qualified drives can last at scale," said Dan Spraggins, CTO, Backblaze. "As those older generations continue to cycle out, we’re turning our focus to how the newest generations perform. Our high-capacity drives continue to post some of the lowest failure rates in the fleet."

Looking Ahead: Shingled Magnetic Recording

As manufacturers push toward ever-higher drive capacities for AI training, this quarter's report also includes an in-depth explainer on shingled magnetic recording (SMR), a technique that overlaps data tracks like roof shingles to fit roughly 10% to 25% more capacity on comparable platters. The tradeoff is that SMR performs best with sequential, append-oriented workloads, and adopting it can require changes to the storage software above the drive. There are no SMR drives in Backblaze's fleet today. As SMR models are added, Drive Stats will identify them and report their failure rates alongside the full fleet, showing how the added capacity performs in production.

Availability

The full report, including per-model failure rate tables, lifetime AFR data, and the complete downloadable dataset, is available on the Backblaze blog: Q2 2026 Drive Stats report.

Backblaze will also host a live webinar on October 8, 2026 from 12-1 p.m. PT / 3-4 p.m. ET to walk through the findings. Register here: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/14807/676808.

The full Drive Stats series can be found at: www.backblaze.com/drivestats

About Backblaze

Backblaze (NASDAQ: BLZE) is the high-performance capacity storage layer for AI. Built over two decades, the company has turned hardware, software, and operational innovation into a platform that delivers the performance and economics the AI era demands — without lock-in. Today, more than 500,000 customers trust Backblaze to move and store the data powering their businesses, reaching hundreds of millions of end users across 175 countries. For more information, visit www.backblaze.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260929525932/en/

Press Contact:
Renatta Siewert
press@backblaze.com

Source: Backblaze, Inc.

Key Terms

annualized failure rate technical

Annualized failure rate is the percentage chance that a product, device, treatment or component will fail over the course of one year, expressed on a yearly basis even if the underlying data came from a shorter or longer test period. Investors use it to gauge ongoing reliability, warranty and replacement costs, and regulatory or reputational risk — like knowing how often a car is likely to break down each year when deciding its true operating cost.

shingled magnetic recording technical

Shingled magnetic recording (SMR) is a hard-disk drive technology that packs more data onto a drive by writing tracks so they overlap like shingles on a roof, increasing storage density without changing the disk’s physical size. It matters to investors because the overlapping design can slow or complicate write operations for some workloads, influencing product pricing, target customers, and revenue mix for storage hardware and cloud-service companies.