Backblaze Tops 340,000 Drives as AI Fuels Rising Storage Demand

Key Points

• Backblaze’s hard drive fleet surpassed 340,000 drives in Q1 2026, with about 1,000 drive failures and a quarterly annualized failure rate of 1.24%. Its lifetime failure rate also rose to 1.39% after being near 1.29% for several quarters.
• Higher-capacity drives are becoming a bigger part of the fleet, with more than 10,000 drives deployed in the quarter and roughly 9,400 above 20TB. Backblaze also said the new 26TB WDC drive is now in production.
• AI is sharply increasing storage demand in media and entertainment workflows by multiplying metadata and expanding file versions, render assets, and deliverables. Backblaze said organizations now care less about cloud vs. on-prem and more about how to connect storage infrastructure efficiently and reliably.

Backblaze NASDAQ: BLZE reported that its hard drive fleet exceeded 340,000 drives in the first quarter of 2026, with about 1,000 drive failures recorded during the period, according to a company webinar discussing its latest Drive Stats report.

Stephanie Doyle, Backblaze senior manager of market intelligence, said the company’s Drive Stats program has collected raw device metrics for more than 13 years and publishes hard drive failure rates based on daily logs from drives in its storage pool. Doyle said the company also analyzes the data in tabular form to calculate annualized failure rates, or AFRs.

For the quarter, Doyle said Backblaze recorded a 1.24% annualized failure rate across the fleet. She said that rate was up from the fourth quarter of 2025 but down on a year-over-year basis. The company’s drive population was described as roughly split among three manufacturers.

Higher-Capacity Drives Continue to Enter the Fleet

Doyle said Backblaze deployed a little more than 10,000 drives during the quarter, with about 9,400 of those drives exceeding 20 terabytes in capacity. She said the company is monitoring that group closely because larger drives have broader implications for storage operations.

The annualized failure rate for drives above 20 terabytes was 0.85% in the quarter, though Doyle cautioned against drawing broad conclusions because those drives are relatively young. “We know for sure that younger drives fail fewer times,” she said.

Doyle also noted that the 26-terabyte WDC drive is now in production. In the lifetime data set, she said 22-terabyte and 26-terabyte drives have now met the criteria to be tracked.

Older four-terabyte drives remained notable in the quarterly data because some models recorded zero failures despite their age. Doyle said those drives averaged 106.1 months old, or a little under 10 years. However, only 186 of them remained in the fleet, and they have now fallen out of the lifetime table due to the report’s inclusion criteria.

Lifetime Failure Rate Moves Higher

Backblaze’s lifetime annualized failure rate rose to 1.39% in the latest report, compared with a level that Doyle said had been holding near 1.29% for several quarters. She attributed the increase partly to the exit of older four-terabyte drives from the pool and the lifetime table.

Doyle said the shift illustrates how changes in the drive population can affect reported failure rates. The company applies different exclusions to its lifetime statistics than to quarterly statistics, including minimum thresholds for drive days and drive population.

Backblaze Highlights Caveat in Failure Reporting

Doyle also discussed what she called a “disturbance in the Drive Stats,” describing an incident in which an otherwise acceptable drive model began showing rising failures. She said Backblaze’s investigation ultimately found two distinct issues that could affect drives separately or together.

One issue involved power cycling. Doyle said the company observed that some drives had trouble coming back online, or would not come back online, after being fully shut down. Backblaze mitigated the issue by reducing power cycle frequency for affected vaults, which brought the failure rate down to what Doyle described as a reasonable level.

The investigation led Backblaze to revisit how it defines a failure in its data set. Doyle said a custom C++ job collects SMART stats daily and uses conditional logic to determine whether a drive that was present one day is gone the next. If it is gone, it is logged as a failure, subject to human-maintained exclusion and inclusion tables.

Doyle said drives replaced for routine maintenance are not counted as failures, and a drive whose serial number returns before the end of the quarter is no longer treated as a failure. She also identified a caveat: day-one failures are not logged under the standard logic because a drive must first exist in the data set before it can be counted as missing the following day.

“If we’re undercounting day one failures, we want to make sure that’s well understood,” Doyle said, adding that such failures are rare and that both manufacturers and Backblaze perform drive qualification.

AI and Media Workflows Drive Storage Demand

Laquie Campbell, senior product marketing manager for media and entertainment at Backblaze, said Drive Stats are widely followed in the media industry because large creative files and metadata-heavy workflows increase the importance of reliable storage infrastructure.

Campbell said AI is increasing the amount of data generated across media workflows. She said a video file that previously carried a few hundred metadata attributes may now generate thousands of metadata attributes when AI tools are used.

She also cited AI upscaling as an example. A one-hour 2K ProRes show might run about 100 gigabytes, she said, but retaining 2K, 4K and potentially 8K versions, along with render passes, mezzanines and quality-control deliverables, can significantly expand the storage footprint. Campbell said one new version can realistically add three to four times the footprint per title before accounting for 8K.

Doyle said AI is creating “an explosion of data” and changing access patterns, with high volumes of data moving and being processed through different providers and tools. Campbell said the central question for many media organizations is no longer whether to use cloud or on-premises systems, but how to connect infrastructure efficiently and reliably.

Company Reiterates No Drive Brand Recommendation

In response to audience questions about using Drive Stats to choose a drive, Doyle said Backblaze does not recommend specific brands. She said Backblaze’s environment is demanding because drives run at maximum capacity for their entire lives, while personal use cases may differ.

Doyle said users should first determine the drive size they need, review available data and product reviews, and build an appropriate backup strategy. She recommended, at a minimum, a 3-2-1 backup strategy with copies in the cloud and off-site.

Campbell said the report can help users assess “what reliability at scale looks like” for their own workflows, particularly as organizations use footage and archives for AI modeling, training and other data-intensive processes.

About Backblaze NASDAQ: BLZE

Backblaze, Inc, a storage cloud platform, provides businesses and consumers cloud services to store, use, and protect data in the United States and internationally. The company offers cloud services through a web-scale software infrastructure built on commodity hardware. It also provides Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, which enables customers to store data, developers to build applications, and partners to expand their use cases. This service is offered as a consumption-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and serves use cases, such as public, hybrid, and multi-cloud data storage; application development and DevOps; content delivery and edge computing; security and ransomware protection; media management; backup, archive, and tape replacement; repository for analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning; and Internet of Things.

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