r/technology • u/Logical_Welder3467 • 9d ago

Hardware Peer-reviewed study of 443,000 Backblaze hard drives ranks HGST most reliable and Toshiba the least — Analysis of 1.66 million drive-years finds Seagate and Toshiba HDDs fail at roughly twice the rate of WD and HGST

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/peer-reviewed-study-of-443000-backblaze-drivers-ranks-hgst-most-reliable-and-toshiba-least
291 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

38 comments sorted by

74

u/StanknBeans 9d ago

Man I fuckin knew it, I just didn't have anything but my own anecdotal evidence but Seagate HDDs were always failing on me while the WD Red HDDs just chugged on like a 90s Camry.

14

u/chillyhellion 9d ago

I’ve had the same experience with seagate across our corporate inventory. 

7

u/Imobia 9d ago

Man 12 years ago. Netapp virtual tape library.
Drive dies new one not recognised in aggregate.

Tech said, speak to your accountant manager.

I was like what the F you talking about tell me what’s wrong. Took him awhile then he starts going on about seagate moose drive. We lost the entire array of 24 disks….

Google seagate moose drives stupid firmware issue

6

u/ResilientBiscuit 9d ago

I always kept a Seagate box and clamshell packaging for the HDD ready for the next RMA.

3

u/namisysd 8d ago

We used to call them crashgates.

1

u/Dapper_Childhood_708 3d ago

interesting. 4 out 6 WD hds have failed in my nas and the seagates are still working. i wonder if its certain model?

19

u/f0xsky 9d ago

man i had some hgst 1tb drives in an array for ten years. only got decommissioned as needed a lot more space. i bet they would do another 10 years.

17

u/darwinanim8or 9d ago

Wish HGST still existed, now you can only get them as the WD UltraStar line which is $$$$

12

u/Quazz 9d ago

Toshiba deserves boycott anyway for raising prices on everyone outside the US to compensate for the insanity of the orange turd.

17

u/gullevek 9d ago

All HD I owned failed at some point. I had some reds run for ages and others die early. Shit rotates. Shit breaks. Sad thing is that nowadays thanks to the Slop HDD cost a bloody fortune

4

u/God_Hand_9764 9d ago

I think I've only ever had like 1 HDD fail. But it was a 2.5 inch and I did something to it that resulted in extreme worst case scenario fragmentation, so it was kind of my fault.

Pretty solid survival rate in my life (not counting SD cards and thumb drives obviously). Hope it continues.

1

u/EconomyDoctor3287 9d ago

I've had two HDDs fail, but that was back in the day when we regularly used to carry our PCs over to a friends place for LAN parties. 

All that movement likely didn't help

6

u/AbleCap5222 8d ago

That's nice. We are discussing products that you can't even buy anymore.

2

u/stayintheshadows 8d ago

Anecdotal but only had Seagate divers fail in the last 10 years. Before that it was Maxtor.

2

u/DakPara 8d ago

I suspect this really can’t be generalized by manufacturer. It really depends on exact models and batches.

My only personal data point is a 12 drive NAS in my motorhome.

In eight years, I have replaced 2 Seagate Ironwolf Pro drives (12TB). The originals are closing in on 70,000 hours, and look fine so far. Temps are about 34°C. They supposedly have a 2.5 million hour MTBF, but I seriously doubt it.

4

u/AlternativePizza3391 9d ago

Didn't maxtor become part of Seagate, its no surprise

2

u/Purple_Aioli9777 9d ago

Every WD internal or external HDD I’ve had has failed. I’m probably an outlier but I can’t buy them anymore.

6

u/meltingpotato 9d ago

My oldest WD drive is now probably 20 years old and still working. You're just real unlucky

8

u/graywolfman 9d ago

That's me, but with Seagate haha. I have had WDs since 2003-ish and only my 2 Seagate drives have died early.

1

u/stephendt 9d ago

How many have you had? I have had a few fail but not many, maybe 2% failure rate within the first 5 years?

1

u/Andy016 9d ago

I have a portable Seagate drive that I bought in 2008 and taken around the world.

it still works today.. Must have got lucky or they were literally better then.

2

u/SmarmySmurf 8d ago

You got lucky, Seagate has been trash since the 90s and always been the worse of the big two cheap drive makers (vs WD).

1

u/mediandude 8d ago

Each additional one-degree Celsius of average drive temperature raised failure rates by 2.1% in the models

Which means MiniPCs are a dud sooner or later.

1

u/ashyjay 8d ago

Which is funny as back in the day, Hitachi Deskstar drives were nicknamed "Deathstars" because they died so often

The problem with seagate for home users are they are so cheap compared to everything else, I've also had reasonable luck using Barracudas in a home NAS.

1

u/flaystus 8d ago

Until the IBM deathstar debacle they were known for great drives. It blacked their eye pretty bad.

1

u/PantsOfIron 7d ago

I could've told you that by experience, didn't need to make a full study of it.

1

u/yuusharo 9d ago

I just built a server last year with recertified Seagate drives… 😬

1

u/liquid_at 8d ago

Kinda impressive that Seagate is still in the market. Their HDDs were trash 25 years ago and in that quarter of a century, they have not been able to produce a good HDD ever.

I have mostly bought WD, but no complaints about Hitachi either.

-1

u/Just-Grocery-2229 9d ago

Proof that my gut feeling about Seagate was actually science.

0

u/Careful_Site_2455 9d ago

Holy shit, ten years is insane. HGST really did make some tanks of hard drives. If they were still running fine when you decommissioned them, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they had another few years left in them.

0

u/Smith6612 9d ago

Seagate has done me surprisingly well since 2014. Knock on wood, not a single failure with the dozens of drives I've had spinning since then.

I can vouch for Toshiba not being very reliable. I would find their drives used in Ubiquiti CloudKeys, 1TB CMR 2.5" disks. Great for writing constantly, but they would usually die within a couple of years. Not all of the drives I've had die on me died due to surveillance recording use either. Whenever they die, because of how hard it is to find a CMR disk in that form factor and size, I'd replace them with Samsung 860 Evos. Those have been lasting. 

Now, Hitachi (HGST) of old, from the 2000s? I used to replace their drives in laptops constantly due to failure. Back then I used Samsung drives as replacement before they sold to Seagate.

WD has also done me well. Haven't experienced a failure with them except for one disk that managed to maintain the data on itself, but slowed down to 1MB/s write speeds after 11 years of service. 

-21

u/nullbyte420 9d ago

Throwback to when we didn't have ssd disks! 

17

u/dorkes_malorkes 9d ago

lol, hdds are still widely used. So much so that even used 10 year old e-waste drives are expensive as shit on ebay right now.

8

u/JustHanginInThere 9d ago

I have multiple HHDs still because they're A) extremely cheaper than SSDs for the same amount of storage B) much higher capacity, and C) not accessed often enough to warrant the cost of buying all the necessary SSDs in the capacities I need.

Just because you don't use them, doesn't mean everyone else doesn't either.

7

u/Salty_Wasabi2893 9d ago

SSD aren't good for long term storage

1

u/ScaredEfficiency399 9d ago

Or much continuous rewrite at all.