Backblaze's Hard Drive Failure Rate Hits 1.73%, Highest in Years
Backblaze drive stats for Q2 2026
Backblaze's Q2 2026 Drive Stats report shows an annualized failure rate of 1.73% across 354,415 drives, the highest in recent quarters. Three drives exceeded the 6.95% outlier threshold, including a 10TB Seagate at 9.33%. Seagate models swept the zero-failure list, while two older HGST drives retired. The report also notes no new drive models for the second consecutive quarter, with deployments concentrated in 20TB+ drives.
The quarterly AFR is 1.73%, the highest it’s been in quite a while.
- realityfactchex
In 2013 Backblaze saw ~14% avg failure rate at 3 years 3 months. Drive useful life: 4 years, roughly.
In 2021, Backblaze saw ~14% failure rate at 7 years 9 months. Drive useful life: about 6 years.
That gave us what was a stable-seeming, old "replace drives at 5 years, or you're getting risky" rule of thumb (unless you prefer to replace on failure, of course).
In 2025, Backblaze saw ~5% failure rate at 10 years 3 months. Drive useful life: ~10 years, roughly!
Thanks for all the HDD improvements, industry!
- sgammon
Tables with headers that scroll differently from their body is a horror I had not imagined until I clicked this link
- reenorap
Hard drives.... I remember those things... didn't I used to use them before the Great HDD and SSD Extinction of 2025-2026?
Seriously, I had to replace 2 hard drives in my NAS this year like a bad luck lottery and my hard drives have doubled in price. I was terrified that my NVMe was failing as well.
- Gigachad
Something that's interested me is how hard drive capacities have continuously gone up, but read and write speeds have not really changed. To the point where it would take multiple days to read these new high capacity drives.
I wonder what the use case for them is, they aren't ideal for RAID as they would take far too long to rebuild the array in a drive failure, but they also aren't great for long term cold storage. Perhaps they are ideal for periodic backups where you want to take a daily 1TB backup of a server or CCTV where you don't really care about backing up the data as it's all deleted on schedule anyway.
- Ellis_dev
Always interesting to see if my anecdotal Seagate failures align with the stats. WD Red's usually pull through for me.
- atmosx
I bought two WD Red 6TB drives for a NAS, and both failed within two years. That’s unusually bad in my experience. Across two other NAS systems I’ve used for 15–20 years, I’ve only replaced drives three times.
One failed drive was replaced with the same model, which doesn’t inspire much confidence. The other couldn’t be replaced, so I received a refund of the original €198 purchase price from 1.5 years ago. The exact same 6TB drive now costs around €340, a pretty steep increase. For the second drive I went with Seagate, fingers crossed.
- pocketman
Seagate: It was the best of drives, it was the worst of drives…
*AFR%-wise
- tgsovlerkhgsel
I'm surprised Backblaze doesn't use host-managed SMR. I would expect that they'd already write data sequentially for speed and have different storage tiers (for "hot" data likely to be changed/deleted soon vs. data expected to stay for a long time). At least for large files in the cold tier SMR would make a lot of sense.