New study finds HGST, WD hard drives fail less often than Seagate and Toshiba

A new study examining the reliability of hard drive manufacturers HGST, Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba has revealed that HGST and Western Digital drives have lower failure rates compared to Seagate and Toshiba drives. The findings, published in a peer-reviewed IEEE study by Christoph Siemroth and Yeomyung Park, are based on data from 443,156 drives used in Backblaze data centers between 2013 and the second quarter of 2025, covering over 1.66 million drive-years.

HGST drives failed at approximately 41% of Seagate's rate, while Western Digital drives failed at about 52% of Seagate's rate. Toshiba drives had a failure rate equal to 107% of Seagate's rate. Despite HGST being discontinued as a separate new-drive option, it ranked first in the analysis. Western Digital acquired HGST in 2012 and phased out the brand later.

The study differs from Backblaze's regular quarterly reliability reports, which compare the drives in the company's storage fleet at a given time. This approach can produce uneven comparisons due to varying fleet ages. To address this, the researchers adjusted their analysis to account for differences in drive stages of service life and excluded some bias caused by drives being removed from Backblaze's dataset without a recorded failure, primarily due to replacement as the company moved to higher-capacity hardware.

The study found that Toshiba drives had the sharpest rise in failure rate after 60 months of service, with a monthly failure rate increasing more than fourfold from 50 to 100 months. Seagate had the highest failure rate among newer drives but did not increase as sharply with age compared to Toshiba. Backblaze observed that many drive failures occur before a drive has been in operation for three years, and operating temperature also affected failure rates, with each 1-degree Celsius increase raising the failure rate by 2.1%.

Higher-capacity drives performed better, with each additional terabyte linked to a 3.4% decline in failure rates. However, the results are more applicable to evaluating drive reliability during its early and middle years and may not apply to consumer PCs or home storage systems.