Backblaze, Inc., 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.
92% of newly deployed hard drives exceed 20TB for AI workloads.
Fleet AFR improved to 1.24% from 1.42% in Q1 2025.
20TB+ drives have 0.85% AFR across 86,000+ units.
Toshiba MG11ACA24TE (24TB) recorded 0.22% AFR.
WDC WUH722222ALE6L4 (22TB) at 45,000+ units with 0.38% AFR.
Last original 4TB HGST drives retired after ~9 years of service.
Gleb Budman, CEO of Backblaze, stated: "The infrastructure teams running the world's most intensive AI workloads are doing rigorous due diligence on reliability, performance, and operational transparency. 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."
At 1.24%, the Q1 2026 AFR is down from 1.42% in Q1 2025, demonstrating continued improvement in reliability despite rapidly increasing drive capacities. 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. Of the 10,220 drives deployed during the quarter, more than 9,400 were 20TB or larger.
Dan Spraggins, CTO of Backblaze, stated: "We're seeing newer generations of high-capacity drives mature with excellent reliability. 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. The company is documenting the nuance in the interest of transparency for users referencing the raw data set.
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.
About Backblaze
Backblaze 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 workloads, 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.
