A hard drive reliability check on 341,263 drives, from 4TB to past 20TB Large cloud storage operators track their hard drives every day, recording which units keep running and which ones drop off the racks. Backblaze does this at scale, and its Q1 2026 report covers a fleet built for continuous use. The analysis covered 341,263 hard drives, after boot drives and a small group of units that missed the reporting thresholds were set aside. The pool spans capacities from 4TB to past 20TB. The quarterly annualized failure rate came to 1.24%. That figure rose from the prior quarter and settled under the level of a year earlier. Across the whole fleet, the lifetime failure rate stands at 1.39%, a steadier long-run gauge of how the hardware holds up. Newer, higher-capacity hardware carried much…