Backblaze (BLZE) Investor update summary

Q2 2026 drive performance

• Quarterly AFR rose to 1.73; three models were statistical outliers at 7.63%, 8.26% and 9.33%.

• Outliers reflected drives older than seven years and/or low populations; the 14 TB Seagate’s 8.26% AFR represented 25 failures among 1,200 drives, with affected drives being cycled out.

• Lifetime AFR was 1.41%, within the recent 1.39–1.41 range.

• Seagate 8 TB, 12 TB and 14 TB models had zero failures; a 16 TB Seagate had one failure.

• Retired 4 TB and 8 TB HGST drives were nine and eight years old, respectively.

Fleet mix and deployment

• No new drive models were introduced for a second consecutive quarter; deployments used existing qualified models, supporting more uniform vaults and easier drive swaps.

• Nearly a quarter of the fleet was approaching 20 TB drives; the oldest 20 TB models were nearing two years, limiting conclusions on long-term failure patterns.

• Capacity comparisons need to account for drive age and deployment timing; prior bathtub-curve analysis compared 20–25 TB drives with 14–16 TB drives by age.

Emerging drive technologies

• CMR remains the established standard; SMR overlaps tracks to increase density, with write behavior and provisioning dependent on drive-managed, host-managed or host-aware implementations.

• SMR had not yet been deployed; manufacturers anticipate it becoming prevalent in enterprise drives within 18 months to two years.

• Longer SMR rebuild times could affect parity design and distributed rebuilds; adapting erasure coding is a potential software-level response.

• HAMR is complementary to CMR/SMR; Seagate Mozaic HAMR drives were cited at 40 TB, with Western Digital projected to reach 100 TB using HAMR.