Hgst, seagate, toshiba or western digital: which discs are the most reliable?

Cloud storage provider Backblaze is back with another hard drive reliability report based on crashes they've reported on their own servers. Backblaze is exceptionally capable of providing failure rate information due to the large number and diverse mix of drives it uses to keep its cloud service alive.

Western Digital is the most failed brand of hard drives

At the end of 2016, Backblaze was supervising 72, 100 multi-capacity units from Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba and HGST. The data you collected does not include units you used for testing purposes or models for which you did not have at least 45 units.

One of the things Backblaze noted is that higher capacity hard drives tend to be more reliable than low capacity drives, except for 3TB hard drives.

3TB (6, 605 HDDs): 1.4%

4TB (54, 189 HDDs): 2.06%

5TB (45 HDDs): 2.22%

6TB (2, 335 HDDs): 1.76%

8TB (8, 765 HDDs): 1.6%

As you can see, the 6 or 8TB disks are more reliable than the 4 or 5TB capacity disks.

HGST is crowned with the most reliable hard drive models

When we talk about the different brands of hard drives and their reliability, we see that Western Digital drives are the ones that have failed the most with 3.88% of cases. The most reliable hard drives were not those of Seagate but those of HGST (Hitachi), with a failure rate of just 0.60% of 24, 545 drives used.

Blackblaze also analyzed which models have failed the most, where the Seagate ST4000DX000 draws attention , which failed in 13.57% of cases. Another case that draws attention is the Western Digital WD60EFRX 6TB, which failed in 5.49% of cases.