Backblaze Drive Stats for Q1 2026
Backblaze Blog, Thursday, July 9th, 2026
Backblaze's Q1 2026 drive report, delayed by a data anomaly, shows high-capacity drives excelling.
Backblaze released its Q1 2026 hard-drive failure analysis, delayed from May to investigate a data anomaly. It covered 341,263 drives with a quarterly AFR of 1.24% (up quarter-over-quarter, down year-over-year) and a lifetime AFR of 1.39%. No new drive models debuted, an uncommon occurrence, while drives above 20TB posted an impressive 0.85% AFR despite being new.
The investigation found an edge case where drives had two distinct mechanical issues - one affecting writes and another triggered by power cycling - prompting Backblaze to move affected vaults to reserve status.
The report stresses that low failure rates reflect people actively managing risk, and notes the program cannot detect day-one failures due to day-over-day presence comparison.