WD vs Toshiba vs HGST vs Seagate — Which Hard Drives Are Most Reliable?

Short Bytes: Is your hard drive reliable enough to store your important data? The latest Backbaze report is here to answer your queries and help you decide the best hard drive brand. According to their extensive tests, 8TB HGST and 4TB Toshiba drives were able to survive the entire year without any failure. Also, 3TB and 8TB hard drives were found to be most dependable ones.

Even though the adoption of solid state drives and cloud storage is growing by leap and bounds, the good old hard drives are not going away anytime soon. This also highlights the factors one should look into while buying a new hard drive.

Which is the most reliable hard drive? This question is very complex as testing hard drives is a tiresome and time-consuming process. Also, the hard drive makers hesitate from releasing the data related to the failure rates of their products. In such situation, Backblaze is here to your rescue.

Backblaze is known for recording and saving daily stats from the drives in their data centers. The company is here with their latest data, which will give you a good idea regarding the most reliable hard drives.

At 2016 Q4 end, Backblaze was monitoring 72,100 data drives. The data shared by the company covers the performance of 71,939 production hard drives. Here’s the table of the failure rates:

Most dependable hard drives in 2016 Q4

Over the course of this period, if you take a look at the table, the 8TB HGST, 8TB Seagate, and 4TB Toshiba hard drives were the only ones with 0% failure rate. Here, you can ignore the 8TB Seagate model as it had an average age of just 1.44 months. On the other hand, 8TB HGST and 4TB Toshiba drives went the entire year without any failure.

Compared to the 2.47% failure rate in 2015, the overall hard drive failure rate was 1.95%. It was far below the 6.39% failure rate for 2014.

Hard drive failure rates by drive size

Talking specifically about the size, the 4TB and 6TB hard drives were found to be most vulnerable, with 2.06% and 2.22% failure rate, respectively. On the other hand, 3TB and 8TB hard drives were found to be most dependable, with 1.40% and 1.60% failure rates, respectively.

Hard drive failure rates by manufacturer

Now, comes the turn of most dependable manufacturers. WDC turned out to be the worst performer with 3.88% failure rates, followed by Seagate with 2.65% failure rate. HGST and Toshiba were the best performers with 0.60% and 1.27% failure rates, respectively.