Backblaze drive stats for Q2 2026
- ID
- 30472
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 29 Sep 2026, 9:34 PM
- Fetched
- 01 Oct 2026, 3:20 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q2-2026/
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 5.5
- Created
- 01 Oct 2026, 3:21 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersdatabase_learners
What happened
Backblaze published its Q2 2026 Drive Stats, covering 359,101 drives monitored between April 1 and June 30, 2026, of which 3,881 boot drives and 705 hard drives were excluded, leaving 354,415 hard drives analyzed. The report says it tracks drives at 20TB and above as a group and will compare CMR HDDs against newer higher-capacity drives. The excerpt cuts off before any annualized failure rate numbers, model-level results, or lifetime fleet figures appear, so no specific reliability figures can be quoted from it.
Why it matters
You cannot act on this yet: the supplied text contains the methodology (354,415 drives analyzed, 3,881 boot drives and 705 HDDs excluded) but none of the failure rates, so there is no model to avoid or buy based on what is here. The one concrete thing is that Backblaze is now segmenting 20TB+ drives as their own group, which is the number to watch if your storage cost planning assumes high-capacity drives behave like the older CMR units you already run. If you want the actual data, the cited webinar is Thursday, October 8 at 12 p.m. PT with Stephanie Doyle and David Johnson, or wait for the full table.
Discussion angle
Backblaze is splitting out 20TB+ drives as a separate cohort — does that signal the high-capacity drives builders are now buying behave differently from the CMR drives the historical stats were built on, and what would you need to see in the numbers before changing a storage purchase decision?