Backblaze Flags Q2 Drive Failure Rise, Sees Outliers Not a Trend

Key Points

• Backblaze’s quarterly annualized hard-drive failure rate rose to 1.73% in Q2 2026, driven largely by three outlier models with high failure rates. Management said the affected drives were mostly older or represented small populations, making the increase a statistical outlier rather than a broad trend.
• The company’s lifetime annualized failure rate remained stable at 1.41%, consistent with its historical range. Backblaze also said it has not observed a clear link between larger drive capacities and higher failure rates, though its newest 20 TB drives have limited operating history.
• Backblaze has not yet deployed SMR or HAMR drives but is monitoring both technologies as storage capacities increase. Adoption could occur within the next five years and may require changes to testing, provisioning and data-rebuild practices.

Backblaze NASDAQ: BLZE reported a quarterly annualized failure rate of 1.73% across its hard-drive fleet in its Q2 2026 Drive Stats report, an increase from the company’s longer-term average but one that management said was largely attributable to a small number of statistical outliers.

Stephanie Doyle, Backblaze’s senior manager of market intelligence, said the company has collected and published raw device metrics and related drive-failure statistics since 2013. The quarterly data set covers hard disk drives and solid-state drives used in the company’s data centers, although the company’s regularly published Drive Stats reporting is focused primarily on hard drives.

Quarterly Failure Rate Rose as Several Models Produced Outliers

Doyle said the 1.73% quarterly annualized failure rate, or AFR, represented a “marked rise” from prior quarterly results. However, an outlier review identified three drive models with annualized failure rates of 7.63%, 8.26% and 9.33%.

According to Doyle, the higher rates were explainable based on the age or population size of the drives involved. Two of the outlier models were more than seven years old, while two had relatively low drive counts. For example, she said a Seagate 14-terabyte model with an 8.26% AFR recorded 25 failures, a figure that had a larger percentage impact because Backblaze had roughly 1,200 of those drives in service.

“Those are all pretty normal indicators” for drives being cycled out of the system, Doyle said, adding that the company did not see a major cause for concern despite the higher surface-level AFR figures.

Several Seagate models had no failures during the quarter, including certain 8 TB, 12 TB and 14 TB models. Backblaze also retired older HGST drive populations, including 4 TB and 8 TB models that had been in service for approximately nine and eight years, respectively.

The company did not introduce new drive models during the quarter, following another quarter without new models. Doyle said the lack of new models did not reflect slower platform growth. Instead, she said Backblaze prefers to deploy identical or similar models in new storage vaults when qualified models remain available and are performing well. Using consistent drive models can also provide more replacement capacity when failures occur.

Lifetime AFR Remained Stable

Backblaze’s lifetime AFR was 1.41%, a level Doyle described as consistent with prior readings that have generally ranged around 1.39% to 1.41%. She attributed the relative consistency to the company operating a managed system designed to keep its drive populations in healthy operating ranges.

David Johnson, Backblaze’s director of product marketing, noted that a growing portion of the company’s fleet is approaching 20 TB capacities. Doyle said Backblaze has not found an inherent relationship between larger drive capacity and higher failure rates, though she cautioned that the company’s 20 TB drives remain comparatively young, with its oldest population approaching about two years in service.

She said comparisons across capacity groups can be complicated because Backblaze has deployed drives in waves over time. Older, smaller-capacity populations have more operating history than newer, larger-capacity models, making drive age an important variable in any failure-rate comparison.

Backblaze Discusses SMR and HAMR Storage Technologies

The presentation also addressed emerging hard-drive technologies, including shingled magnetic recording, or SMR, and heat-assisted magnetic recording, or HAMR.

Johnson described conventional magnetic recording, or CMR, as the established technology used in Backblaze’s current drive fleet. SMR increases data density by overlapping tracks on a disk platter, allowing manufacturers to store more data in the same physical drive. Doyle said the approach has implications for how drives are read, written and provisioned in data-center environments.

Backblaze has not yet deployed SMR drives, Doyle said. However, she said drive manufacturers have indicated that SMR is expected to become increasingly common in enterprise storage over the next 18 months to two years. The company expects that adopting the technology would require testing and potential changes to provisioning and parity approaches, particularly because rebuild times can affect data-protection schemes.

HAMR, meanwhile, is a separate technology that uses a laser-assisted writing process to create more stable magnetic grains and improve storage density. Doyle emphasized that HAMR is not an alternative to CMR or SMR, but rather another technology that can be used alongside recording methods. She cited Seagate’s Mozaic drives as HAMR products and said Western Digital is projected to reach 100 TB capacity using HAMR technology.

Backblaze said it expects to monitor SMR and HAMR technologies as they enter its fleet, though Doyle did not provide a deployment schedule. She said such deployments are not expected immediately but could be considered within the next five years.

SSD Reporting Remains Limited

Responding to questions about SSD data, Doyle said Backblaze has previously published SSD information but considers its current SSD data set difficult to compare with hard-drive statistics. The company primarily uses SSDs as write-through cache devices, where incoming data is temporarily received before being moved to hard drives, as well as for server boot drives.

Those SSD workloads differ materially from the company’s hard-drive workloads, and the SSD population includes fewer models and smaller sample sizes, Doyle said. Backblaze may revisit SSD reporting as its platform expands, but she said the company does not currently have a commitment to resume it.

About Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE)

Backblaze, Inc provides cloud storage and data backup services for businesses, developers, and individual customers. Its platform is designed to help organizations store, protect, manage, and access data without maintaining their own extensive physical storage infrastructure.

The company's primary offerings include Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, an object storage service for applications, backup systems, content delivery, and data-intensive workloads, and Backblaze Computer Backup, which automatically backs up data from computers.

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