Western Digital delivered a revenue beat of $90 million, posting $2.82 billion against expectations of $2.73 billion. The real strength came from non-GAAP earnings per share of $1.78, which exceeded the $1.58 estimate by $0.20. The beat reflects robust demand from cloud and AI-driven data center workloads, which are pushing customers toward high-capacity storage solutions.
That conclusion came from a blog post this week by Stephanie Doyle, Backblaze's writer and blog operations specialist, and Pat Patterson, Backblaze's chief technical evangelist. The authors compared the AFRs for the approximately 317,230 drives in Backblaze's datacenter to the AFRs the company recorded when examining the 21,195 drives it had in 2013 and 206,928 drives in 2021. Doyle and Patterson said they identified "a pretty solid deviation in both age of drive failure and the high point of AFR from the last two times we've run the analyses."