Study reveals hard drive reliability trends
Discover the latest hard drive reliability trends from Backblaze’s 2026 report, revealing failure rates and long-term performance insights.
Backblaze’s latest hard drive reliability report for the first quarter of 2026 covers 341,263 active drives. The company excluded boot drives and units that didn’t meet reporting thresholds, focusing on capacities from 4TB to over 20TB.
Failure rates increase but remain below last year’s levels
The quarter’s annualized failure rate climbed to 1.24%, a rise from the previous quarter but still below the same period a year ago. The lifetime rate stood at 1.39%, providing a long-run gauge of hardware performance.
Higher-capacity drives introduced during the quarter showed stronger reliability. Over 10,000 new drives joined the fleet, most exceeding 20TB. These newer units recorded an annualized failure rate of 0.85%.
No new drive models were added this quarter, breaking a streak where new models arrived in six of the last eight quarters. Several existing models operated without a single failure, including the HGST HUH728080ALE600 and two others.
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Limited sample sizes distort some outcomes
Failure counts and rates don’t always align. The Seagate ST16000NM000J had only one failure but showed a 3.61% annualized rate due to its small pool of about 130 units. A single failure in a small group can sharply alter the percentage.
Other models, such as the Toshiba MG09ACA16TE and two Seagate drives in the 12TB to 14TB range, also reported one failure each. Their larger populations kept the rates low.
The company uses a C++ program to collect SMART statistics daily. A drive missing the following day is marked as failed, though a lookback window reverses the call if the serial number reappears within the quarter, as described in the report. The method depends on a drive appearing in the pool the day before, which leaves day-one failures outside its reach. Some drives fail on their first day in a data center, and the counter can miss them. Day-one failures have likely gone under-recorded across the program’s history, though pre-deployment testing keeps such cases rare.
The complete dataset remains available for download.
