Backblaze drive stats for Q2 2026

Drive Availability & Pricing

• Several commenters note that high-capacity consumer HDDs, especially certain “Black” or NAS lines, are now hard to buy or seemingly reserved for large buyers, while older/smaller models remain available at higher prices.
• Many report 2× price increases for 12–14 TB disks over the last 1–3 years, calling it a break from the historic trend of rising capacity at similar cost.
• Some see current prices as merely “back to 2020 levels,” while others track specific models that have clearly doubled.

Use Cases for Very Large HDDs

• Debate over the practicality of 20–30 TB drives: critics highlight week-long fill and rebuild times and risk during degraded RAID.
• Others argue they’re ideal for backups, cold/archival storage, object stores, or as local caches for cloud data, where latency is less critical and redundancy is handled elsewhere.

Performance, Reliability, and RAID Concerns

• Commenters observe capacities rising much faster than throughput; sequential speeds for 7200 RPM drives have plateaued around a few hundred MB/s.
• Some explain modest speed gains via higher areal density; others say most capacity gain comes from more platters/tracks, not linear density.
• Long rebuild times raise concerns about reduced redundancy windows; counterpoints suggest using RAID6/RAIDZ2/RAIDZ3, erasure coding, and frequent scrubs to mitigate.

Backblaze Stats, Methodology, and Impact

• Many appreciate the long-term drive failure data and note improved lifetimes: rough interpretations suggest useful life stretching from ~4 to ~10 years over the decade.
• Others caution that Backblaze’s quarterly AFR comparisons are confounded by drive age and call for survival analysis; Backblaze reportedly encourages outsiders to analyze the raw data.
• Discussion references evidence that the classic “bathtub curve” for HDD failures has flattened, with less infant mortality and a later, softer wear-out phase.

Technologies: SMR and Future HDD Designs

• Some are surprised Backblaze doesn’t use host‑managed SMR, arguing many large providers have done so for years; others say cost savings were historically modest relative to software complexity.
• There is mention of vendors working on higher‑bandwidth HDD designs to address stagnant throughput.

Brand Anecdotes & Recertified Drives

• Mixed anecdotes: some report repeated failures with specific NAS lines or SMR models; others report decade‑plus lifetimes from “green” or HGST drives.
• Recertified/whitelabel drives are debated: one commenter had a recertified enterprise drive fail after a year and now avoids them; another reports many recertified drives running 24/7 for years without issues.
• General consensus: Backblaze’s aggregated stats are more informative than isolated anecdotes, but individual experiences still heavily shape brand preferences.

Market Forces & AI/Data Center Boom

• Commenters connect higher HDD prices to AI and data center demand for all infrastructure components, comparing it to past GPU price spikes from crypto mining.
• Some direct frustration at “AI slop” workloads crowding out normal users; others argue the root issue is vast capital flows that could have distorted any targeted hardware segment.

Miscellaneous: UI, AI Text, and Drive Disposal

• Several complain about Backblaze’s web UI: sticky table headers that don’t scroll horizontally, multiple scrollbars, and poor mobile UX.
• There’s meta‑discussion about overused “AI‑ish” phrasing in tech writing and how it may pollute future training data.
• For dead drives, suggestions are to physically destroy and discard them; a few people salvage the strong magnets but note they often just become unused clutter.