WD and HGST drive reliability beats Seagate and Toshiba in large fleet study
An IEEE peer‑reviewed study using Backblaze data (443,156 HDDs across 2013–Q2 2025, ~1.66 million drive-years) found HGST and Western Digital drives have lower adjusted failure rates than Seagate and Toshiba after accounting for age, capacity, temperature, and form factor. HGST failed at about 41% of Seagate’s rate; WD about 52%; Toshiba about 107%. The analysis addresses fleet-age biases and notes Toshiba’s failures rise sharply after ~60 months. Higher temperatures increase failure risk (about 2.1% per 1°C; ~23% per 10°C), while larger capacity drives tended to fail less (roughly 3.4% fewer failures per extra TB). Results pertain to enterprise data-center drives, not consumer PCs, and reflect biases from evolving drive mixes. About 0.52% of drives were removed without a recorded failure. Backblaze’s 2025 annualized failure rate was 1.36%.
