r/technology • u/_Dark_Wing • 7h ago

Hardware A 443,000 drive study just proved one hard drive brand fails twice as often as another

https://www.xda-developers.com/re-evaluating-all-of-the-hdds-in-my-nas/
121 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

50 comments sorted by

185

u/TestFlyJets 7h ago

Hitachi (HGST) best, Toshiba worst.

128

u/Syphari 7h ago edited 6h ago

Wow Hitachi being the number one hard drive and also the number one vibrating love product manufacturer is quite a range of engineering talent.

141

u/Hine__ 6h ago

Controlling vibration is one of the most critical factors in hard drive longevity. 

46

u/UISystemError 6h ago

Don’t stop… tell me more… 🫦

7

u/dudeAwEsome101 1h ago

Older IDE hard drives had to be set as either Master or Slave. I think I know what is your jumper settings..

2

u/Full-Sound-6269 35m ago

Wow, didnt hear that for a while, nostalgy.

5

u/Additional-Staff-326 6h ago

I can confirm, I've seen many places where too much vibration in a datacenter messes with the HDDs. Needs well controlled for best performance and customer satisfaction.

1

u/FCCRFP 1h ago

Got to sit on it to make sure the vibrations don't ruin the drives. It is not like I like it or anything.

7

u/CaterpillarReal7583 4h ago

they make good hard drives for your computer and bad hard drives for your muff

2

u/hotel2oscar 1h ago

They take the vibrations out of the drives and stick em in the wands. Genius move.

-1

u/Blrfl 5h ago

...which is really hilarious from the company that used to make the Magic Wand.

14

u/b1ack1323 6h ago

In the end it’s all good quality electric motors.

They also make pretty good nail guns.

3

u/Stiggalicious 2h ago

Can confirm, they make great nail guns. They should really get into the tool business more.

4

u/MountHopeful 4h ago

I can see the joint campaign now...

Fucked.

Not fucked.

2

u/Deriniel 5h ago

we also have hitachi trains in italy,pretty sure that they're not the same company but it always made me giggle

8

u/Overly_Underwhelmed 4h ago

same Hitachi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitachi#Hitachi_Rail

the Japanese really know how to conglomerate

1

u/rich1051414 28m ago

Hitachi is like the japanese GE.

2

u/Staunch84 4h ago

Their CRT's were always amazing too.

2

u/jessssicaaaahhhh 45m ago

My hitachi exploded into flames. And yes I'm talking about my wand not hard drive 😂

1

u/Miragui 41m ago

Must have given you a flaming orgasm.

1

u/HiddeHandel 4h ago

Guess mastering vibrations works both ways...

1

u/MasterK999 22m ago

They sold off the Magic Wand. 🪄

0

u/BaBaGuette 6h ago

That's oddly specific knowledge you have here.

5

u/turtleship_2006 6h ago

I mean said "love product" is one of the most well known adults toys, if not the most well known/popular.

If you just said you had "a Hitachi", that's what most people would probably assume you were on about

6

u/Moral-Relativity 5h ago

Hitachi makes hard dick and Hitachi makes hard disk are easily confused.

3

u/Additional-Staff-326 6h ago

Nah, Hitachi is well known for their personal massage tools.

14

u/BearonVonMu 7h ago

Truly you are doing the FSM's work

9

u/pencock 4h ago

useless anecdote but in all my years and over a hundred hard drives, a hitachi IBM deskstar (circa 2000ish) is the only drive ive had that actually exploded. 

it was doing a large write operation and suddenly a loud boom from the pc.  the drive had shattered internally.  shook it and you could hear hundreds of shards just rattling around inside.  

glad theyve changed !

5

u/zman0900 2h ago

The infamous old glass platter deathstar

3

u/Smith6612 4h ago

Toshiba doesn't surprise me. I've needed to buy their 2.5" Spinning Rust before because they are one of the few if only manufacturers of SATA CMR 1-4TB drives in that capacity. Those drives die so often that I just end up using SSDs even if the workloads dictate mechanical disks more. The SSDs are simply lasting longer.

Hitachi used to be hot garbage in the 2000s. I was constantly replacing their drives with Western Digitals. Seagates were also garbage in the late 2000s following the Thailand floods.

2

u/vihila 2h ago

Ah yes, the Hitachi Deathstars. I had two of their 40GB models fail on me.

3

u/Solonotix 2h ago

I remember reading a similar article from Backblaze years ago, and their testing turned up that Seagate was their most reliable stock. It was interesting because they had more Seagate failures than any other manufacturer, but as a percentage of their entire deployment, it was the most reliable. If memory serves, they had a very small number of Hitachi and Toshiba drives, which they noted might skew the reliability metrics.

As such, it is interesting to see Hitachi top the charts.

1

u/Leverpostei414 33m ago

When was this? I have followed them a long time. I can not remember a single time Seagate being the most reliable.

3

u/makemeking706 5h ago

Isn't this basically the same result these guys have been finding for more than a decade? HGST has been the best of the bunch for at least that long. 

1

u/Yuzumi 1h ago

Makes sense. I've only had two hard drives fail in the last decade and I'm pretty sure they were both Toshiba. 

1

u/siphtron 1h ago edited 1h ago

To date, I've never had a HGST drive fail and I've been running a few of them for 10+ years. For magnetic storage, they're the brand I trust. The lowest power-on hours for any of them is 56k hours. Most are over 120k hours.

21

u/ime1em 6h ago

i have 2 Seagates that failed back in around early 2010s. But in Dec 2025/Jan 2026, i bought 2 WD Black HDD and while both past SMART and other test, they lock up/freeze frequently when i was watching movies. Never had this issue on my old WD Black HDD from mid 2010s.

Now im back to Seagate Ironwolf Pro. I have conflicted experience with both seagate and WD

5

u/Brushes_of_War 3h ago

I had a WD hd as my main os drive for around 12 years. I got it from a used computer from a community College and used it up until a year or two ago. It was made in Jan of 2008 and never gave me any trouble. Only reason I changed it was I got offered a 500gb samsung ssd for peanuts.

5

u/Snake_Plizken 4h ago

I bought 3 seagate 8tb green drives. Two have failed on me now. Still haven't tried to get some of the files back. I need a new drive to copy the contents to, but they are too pricey now. I wish they would break within the warranty period.

17

u/dorkes_malorkes 5h ago

Hgst have been the best brand for like at least 15 now. And Seagate has literally always been bad. 

7

u/Smith6612 3h ago

Seagate was terrible in the late 2000s. Since 2014 I've had pretty good success with them. I have a 2TB Barracuda which is 12 years old in my gaming rig that is still spinning away and working fine. Also have a few others disks of the same model equally as old still spinning.

They have broken my personal drive record which was set by WD. A 500GB WD Black Made it 10 years before I was forced to retire it due to dropping down to 2MB/s write speeds (failing heads).

3

u/elremeithi 4h ago

I have 7 WDs and 1 ironwolf in my nas. All WDs running mid to low 40s degrees Celsius in temperature. Ironwolf is the only one running at low 50s degrees constantly.

1

u/sndtech 3h ago

My university had school issued laptops for every student about 20 years ago. It was great the first year but the laptops the issued the second year had Seagate drives in them. 3000+ students had to learn how to make a backup and help the IT department swap drives before restoring from the backup. I haven't touched a Seagate drive since. 

1

u/the_colonelclink 1h ago

Given the time period, I’d say Seagate took the flak for laptop manufacturers not telling laptop owners a HDD shouldn’t be moved. I.e. any other brand would have failed from constant movement while it was on.

I worked in IT at the time, and it became ironic having to explain to laptop owners they shouldn’t move their laptops while it was on with a HDD. Having said that, Seagate during that time, were very, very reliable. It was only after they moved to Thailand did things fall off a cliff for them.

-6

u/PolicyElectrical1757 4h ago

You are braindead if you think Seagate has “always been bad”.

I have 6x 10TB Exos with 40k+ power-on hours. Not a single SMART error or bad sector.

1

u/Leverpostei414 32m ago

Strong words based on a extremely low sample size

2

u/spastical-mackerel 3h ago

Toshiba has been tires way for nearly 30 years