Backblaze Publishes Q1 2026 Drive Stats: Reliability Improves as 92% of New Deployments Exceed 20TB

AI workloads push enterprises toward high-capacity storage; fleet AFR improves to 1.24% year-over-year

SAN MATEO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Backblaze, Inc. (Nasdaq: BLZE), the high-performance cloud storage platform for the AI era, today published its Q1 2026 Drive Stats report. In this new report, Backblaze notes that 92% of newly deployed hard drives now exceed 20TB to support increasingly data-intensive AI workloads. Now in its thirteenth year, Drive Stats analyzes more than 341,000 production hard drives across Backblaze's global storage cloud, providing the industry's largest publicly available datasets on drive reliability.

Of the 10,220 drives deployed during the quarter, more than 9,400 were 20TB or larger. The fleet's 20TB+ drives have a 0.85% annual failure rate (AFR) across more than 86,000 units, proving that reliability can scale with capacity.

“The infrastructure teams running the world’s most intensive AI workloads are doing rigorous due diligence on reliability, performance, and operational transparency,” said Gleb Budman, CEO, Backblaze. “As the data demands of AI grow, the storage decisions enterprises are making now have to hold up at a scale the industry hasn't seen before. Drive Stats helps provide data to inform such key decisions.”

Key Findings from the Q1 2026 Drive Stats Report:

• AFR improves year-over-year. At 1.24%, the Q1 2026 AFR is down from 1.42% in Q1 2025. This is a continued improvement in reliability despite rapidly increasing drive capacities. The lifetime AFR holds at 1.39% across hundreds of millions of drive-days, while the modest increase from Q4 2025's record-low 1.13% is within normal quarterly variation.

• High-capacity drives dominate new deployments with strong performance. The WDC WUH722222ALE6L4 (22TB), now Backblaze’s largest single drive model population at over 45,000 units, is posting a 0.38% AFR. The new Toshiba MG11ACA24TE (24TB) recorded a fleet-best 0.22% AFR in early deployment. As this cohort matures, the Drive Stats program will track whether this performance holds.

• Drive performance highlights for Q1 2026: Backblaze has also published the highest-performing drive models within the storage fleet for the last quarter:
  • HGST HMS5C4040BLE640 4TB – 0 failures out of 186 drives
  • HGST HUH728080ALE600 8TB – 0 failures out of 1,026 drives
  • Seagate ST8000NM000A 8TB – 1 failure out of 247 drives
  • Seagate ST12000NM000J 12TB – 1 failure out of 1,087 drives
  • Seagate ST14000NM000J 14TB – 1 failure out of 433 drives
  • Seagate ST16000NM002J 16TB – 0 failures out of 466 drives
  • Seagate ST16000NM000J 16TB – 1 failure out of 129 drives
  • Toshiba MG09ACA16TE 16TB – 1 failure out of 506 drives

This quarter marks a turning point as the last of Backblaze’s original 4TB HGST drives have now dropped below the threshold for both the quarterly and lifetime reporting tables, at over 106 months – nearly nine years – of service.

“We're seeing newer generations of high-capacity drives mature with excellent reliability,” said Dan Spraggins, CTO, Backblaze. “When you’re operating at our scale, even small improvements in failure rates compound significantly across hundreds of thousands of drives and hundreds of millions of drive-days. The data shows a fleet that’s maintaining reliability as it gets bigger, and that’s exactly what we want to see.”

Before publishing this quarter's report, Backblaze investigated unusual activity in the data. The investigation highlighted a long-standing nuance in the Drive Stats methodology: drives that fail before completing their first day in production aren't captured in the dataset. Day-one failures are uncommon given Backblaze's qualification process, though the company is documenting the nuance in the interest of transparency for users referencing the raw data set.

Availability

The full report, including per-model failure rate tables, lifetime AFR data, and the complete downloadable dataset, is available on the Backblaze blog: www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q1-2026/.

Backblaze will also host a live webinar on Wednesday, July 15, at 12:00 p.m. PT to walk through the findings. Register here.

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

About Backblaze

Backblaze (NASDAQ: BLZE) gives businesses the freedom to innovate without limits by removing the barriers of lock-in, complexity, and cost. Our high-performance cloud object storage accelerates AI workflows, powers data-heavy applications, streamlines media management, and protects critical data. As an award-winning independent cloud, we provide unparalleled levels of interoperability that enable over 500,000 of our customers to reach and serve hundreds of millions of end users in 175 countries around the world. For more information, please go to www.backblaze.com.