Peer-Reviewed Study Finds HGST and WD Drives Outperform Seagate and Toshiba in Backblaze Data Centers
A peer-reviewed study analyzing 443,156 hard drives in Backblaze data centers found that HGST and Western Digital (WD) drives have significantly lower failure rates than Seagate and Toshiba when accounting for age, capacity, and temperature. HGST drives failed at roughly 41% of Seagate’s rate, while WD drives failed at 52%. Toshiba drives had the highest failure rate, at 107% of Seagate’s rate. The study, covering 1.66 million drive-years from 2013 to 2025, highlights that raw failure figures can be misleading due to differences in drive age and fleet composition. Higher-capacity drives and cooler operating temperatures were linked to lower failure rates, with each additional terabyte reducing failure risk by 3.4%.