Cloud storage provider Backblaze, Inc. has released its first-quarter 2026 hard drive reliability statistics, revealing ongoing improvements in its storage cluster's dependability and a clear dominance of high-capacity drives in new deployments.
By the end of the quarter, the company was monitoring 341,263 operational hard drives in its global storage cloud. The overall annualized failure rate for the quarter was 1.24%, a notable improvement from the 1.42% rate seen in the same period last year. While this represents an increase from the record-low 1.13% of the previous quarter, it remains within the range of typical quarterly variation.
Key Trends in the Report
A significant trend this quarter was the continued shift toward larger drives. Of the 10,220 hard drives deployed, more than 9,400—accounting for 92%—had a capacity of over 20TB. The total number of 20TB+ drives in the fleet now exceeds 86,000, and this group collectively boasts a low annualized failure rate of just 0.85%, demonstrating that high capacity and high reliability are not mutually exclusive.
Performance by Drive Model
In terms of individual models, the Western Digital 22TB drive is now the most numerous single model in the cluster, with over 45,000 units, and it maintains an annualized failure rate of 0.38%. Newly deployed Toshiba 24TB drives showed an exceptionally strong initial performance, achieving the best failure rate in the entire fleet at just 0.22%.
Several other models recorded zero failures during the quarter, including HGST 4TB and 8TB drives as well as Seagate 16TB drives. Notably, the earliest deployed 4TB HGST drives, which have been in service for nearly nine years, have now aged beyond the statistical thresholds for inclusion in the quarterly and lifetime reports.
Gleb Budman, CEO of Backblaze, Inc., commented that storage decisions for AI workloads require validation at an unprecedented scale, and that the Drive Stats data provides a foundation for making these critical choices.
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