Q2 2026 Drive Stats: Hard Drive Failure Rates

Running a storage cloud means serving as both builder and building inspector. You choose the materials, put them to work at scale, and return quarter after quarter to see how the structure is holding up. After 13+ years of publishing Drive Stats, we know the materials in this particular house pretty well. So, when our preferred home improvement store introduces a new and improved brick (so to speak) we want to understand how it fits into the build. That question is becoming more relevant as higher-capacity drives become more (dare we say) load bearing. We’ve already been tracking the performance of drives at 20TB and above as a group; later in this installment of Drive Stats, we’ll talk about some of the differences between our current building blocks (CMR HDDs) and the new bricks. But first, to take this extended pun to its inevitable conclusion, the inspection (a.k.a. The Stats). This Q2 2026 Drive Stats report begins with the latest walkthrough: the quarter’s annualized failure rates, the models that stood out, and the lifetime record of the fleet. Then, we’ll look at some of the emerging technologies that could shape the next phase of construction. Ready to dive deeper into the data? Tune in Thursday, October 8 at 12 p.m. PT, as Sr. Market Intelligence Manager, Stephanie Doyle, and Director, Product Marketing, David Johnson review the trends. Drive Stats: The digest version Throughout Q2 2026, Backblaze monitored 359,101 drives used to store data. For our evaluation, we removed from consideration 3,881 boot drives and 705 hard drives, as they did not meet the criteria to be included. We’ll discuss the criteria we used in the next section of this report. Removing these drives leaves us with 354,415 hard drives to analyze. The table below shows the annualized failure rates for Q1 2026 for this collection of drives. Backblaze Hard Drive Failure Rates for Q2 2026 Reporting period April 1, 2026–June 30, 2026 inclusiveDrive models with drive count > 100 and drive days > 10,000 as of June 30, 2026 in Q2 2026. MFGModelSize (TB)Drive CountAvg. Age (Months)Drive DaysFailuresAFR (%) HGSTHUH721212ALE600122,59978.4236,10771.08 HGSTHUH721212ALE6041213,19659.41,190,1821093.34 HGSTHUH721212ALN604129,69483.8861,2971807.63 SeagateST8000DM00286,903114.8563,210382.46 SeagateST8000NM000A823940.421,49900 SeagateST8000NM0055813,112104.71,177,5411113.44 SeagateST10000NM008610965101.786,092229.33 SeagateST12000NM00071297278.887,496104.17 SeagateST12000NM00081218,52173.71,671,0571453.17 SeagateST12000NM000J121,0792297,74600 SeagateST12000NM001G1213,17763.71,193,856441.35 SeagateST14000NM000J144971743,34900 SeagateST14000NM001G1410,49863.2949,396391.5 SeagateST14000NM0138141,23565.5110,410258.26 SeagateST16000NM000J1617115.414,22112.57 SeagateST16000NM001G1635,10043.73,162,117560.65 SeagateST16000NM002J1646741.742,08643.47 SeagateST24000NM002H249,63112.2861,587783.3 ToshibaMG07ACA14TA1437,17167.13,368,9241791.94 ToshibaMG07ACA14TEY1498942.889,16462.46 ToshibaMG08ACA16TA1639,93233.73,614,2631001.01 ToshibaMG08ACA16TE166,30651.4568,379161.03 ToshibaMG08ACA16TEY164,85753.5439,243443.66 ToshibaMG09ACA16TE169056.268,42921.07 ToshibaMG10ACA20TE2025,27012.12,117,524641.1 ToshibaMG11ACA24TE249,6205.8824,903130.58 WDCWUH721414ALE6L4148,63564.2783,318231.07 WDCWUH721816ALE6L0162,97053.3268,875304.07 WDCWUH721816ALE6L41626,82737.52,432,374771.16 WDCWUH722222ALE6L42245,66519.14,146,339630.55 WDCWUH722626ALE6L4267,2123.4462,366120.95 Totals354,41531,553,3501,4981.73 Note and observations The quarterly AFR is 1.73%, the highest it’s been in quite a while. We’ll talk about the reasons why in just a bit, but for now, here’s your quarter-over-quarter tracking of the failure rate: As usual, let’s round up the honor roll. These drives had zero failures: Seagate ST8000NM000A (8TB) Seagate ST12000NM000J (12TB) Seagate ST14000NM000J (14TB) And these drives had one: Seagate ST16000NM000J (16TB) No typos here, folks: that’s a clean sweep by Seagate. Out with the old. This quarter, we’ve seen two drives fully retire, the 4TB HGST HMS5C4040BLE640 at nearly nine years old total; and, the 8TB HGST HUH728080ALE600 at nearly eight years old. But where is the new? Just like last quarter, we have no new drive models—a curiosity, especially to have that happen two quarters in a row. But, also like last quarter, that doesn’t mean no new deployments. While most drive models’ counts stayed more or less the same (plus or minus replacements), we once again see deployment concentrated in the 20TB+ drives. What’s going on with the high-end outliers? This quarter we had three outliers, which, according to a quartile analysis, defines an outlier as an AFR above 6.95%. Those drives are: HGST HUH721212ALN604 (12TB)—7.63% Seagate ST10000NM0086 (10TB)—9.33% Seagate ST14000NM0138 (14TB)—8.26% Each of these drives have some pretty clear reasons for high failure rates. The HGST drive is nearly seven  years old, and the 10TB Seagate was nearly 8.5 years old. Meanwhile, both the Seagate drives have a pretty low drive count—the 10TB drive only has 965; whereas the 14TB has 1,235. That means that while they only had 22 and 25 failures (respectively) their AFRs were quite high. It’s worth noting there were a total of seven drives that still had an AFR of >3.0%. While we’ve just determined those aren’t outliers, that’s still quite a few high AFRs compared to other quarters—that means that 10 out 31 drives had an AFR higher than 3.0%. I haven’t done a full analysis of how rare it is to have our distribution of >3.0% skew that high, but a casual look at the last few quarters show it to be skewed towards the higher end of the spectrum. That will, of course, bring up our average. Something to keep an eye on as we move forward. Standard definitions As mentioned, we remove drives that don’t meet our criteria. We’ve covered the reasons that we’ve designed these exclusions in past reports, but here’s the quick and dirty: PeriodDrive CountDrive Days Quarterly> 100> 10,000 Annual> 250> 50,000 Lifetime> 500>100,000 Regardless of whether or not a given drive model is included in this article’s charts and tables, all of the line item data is included in our Drive Stats dataset which you can download by visiting our Drive Stats page. Lifetime hard drive failure rates Backblaze Lifetime Hard Drive Failure Rates Reporting period ending June 30, 2026 inclusiveDrive models with > 500 drives and > 100,000 lifetime drive days MFGModelSize (TB)Drive CountAvg. Age (Months)Drive DaysFailuresAFR (%) HGSTHUH721212ALE600122,59977.46,351,5201110.64 HGSTHUH721212ALE6041213,19657.725,209,1441,2241.77 HGSTHUH721212ALN604129,69479.827,776,0921,8582.44 SeagateST8000DM00286,903107.333,679,0461,4181.54 SeagateST8000NM0055813,11297.146,308,9552,5151.98 SeagateST10000NM00861096592.13,652,8083283.28 SeagateST12000NM00071297231.737,413,2202,3072.25 SeagateST12000NM00081218,52169.844,683,8772,6122.13 SeagateST12000NM000J121,07921.5730,603221.1 SeagateST12000NM001G1213,17762.326,300,5717231 SeagateST14000NM001G1410,49861.220,975,3057951.38 SeagateST14000NM0138141,235562,878,0644645.88 SeagateST16000NM001G1635,10043.147,227,1798760.68 SeagateST24000NM002H249,63112.13,640,6873233.24 ToshibaMG07ACA14TA1437,17165.478,387,0082,2931.07 ToshibaMG07ACA14TEY1498941.11,324,965641.76 ToshibaMG08ACA16TA1639,93233.241,520,7091,2131.07 ToshibaMG08ACA16TE166,30649.910,113,0703411.23 ToshibaMG08ACA16TEY164,85752.18,475,0235642.43 ToshibaMG09ACA16TE169056.1169,81261.29 ToshibaMG10ACA20TE2025,27012.19,324,4272020.79 ToshibaMG11ACA24TE249,6205.81,694,377230.5 WDCWUH721414ALE6L4148,63563.517,127,3492540.54 WDCWUH721816ALE6L0162,97052.84,934,2921621.2 WDCWUH721816ALE6L41626,82737.230,895,5884710.56 WDCWUH722222ALE6L42245,6651926,618,3894230.58 WDCWUH722626ALE6L4267,2123.4736,527170.84 Totals353,041558,148,60721,6091.41 Notes and observations The lifetime AFR is consistent. We see a slight uptick this quarter to 1.41%. Four models don’t make the cut on the lifetime table. These models didn’t make the drive count minimum to be reported in the lifetime table: Seagate ST8000NM000A (8TB)—239 drives Seagate ST14000NM000J (14TB)—497 drives Seagate ST16000NM000J (16TB)—171 drives Seagate ST16000NM002J (16TB)—467 drives Interestingly, the first three on that list all were on our zero failure list as well. About those bigger drives Recently, we’ve spent a lot of time in this series talking about high-capacity drives. The 20TB+ club has grown from a curiosity to more than 25% of the drives in this quarter’s dataset, and deployment continues to concentrate at the larger end of the range. As an industry, we’ve been watching the steady drive towards higher capacity drives—WD announced a 40TB UltraSMR drive just this year, with a roadmap that shows how they’ll get to 100TB by 2029. One way manufacturers are increasing that density is by changing how the tracks themselves are arranged on disk, and that has implications for how data centers read and write data. So, let’s talk about what that looks like. CMR, SMR, and a word about roofing Hard drives write data in concentric tracks. Each track can be rewritten independently. Before we get into anything else, it’s important to understand that there’s a physical size difference between the read and write heads in a hard drive. A simplified diagram of the relative sizes of read and write heads in CMR. Source. With conventional magnetic recording (CMR), those tracks sit side by side with guard space between them. Shingled magnetic recording (SMR) changes the track geometry. The tracks overlap, much like roof shingles—a naming decision that, at least for this report, we decided to really lean in on.