Comparing Seagate vs Western Digital (WD), Toshiba and HGST hard disk failure rates and lifespans.

I've had a bad run of 3 WD drives that die instantly in space of months with no hope of recovery... then I decided to only have Seagate HDD and only had 1 bad Seagate drive that was slowly on it's way out after 5 years and I was able to recover about 70% of non-essential data (it was made around the Thailand flood period) , I've not had a bad Seagate drive in the last 15 years apart from that one. Also I had an enterprise SSD that died last year (fried capacitor) that did have important data but it was not critical as I did have the Seagate backups...

The data on the Toshiba drives is quite interesting, from my experience as a Tech, I've seen more Toshiba Drive failures than anything else with Old Western Digital drives (Pre 2010) being equal to Seagate's, and newer Western Digital drives being a bit better than Toshiba, but not as good as Seagate. Traditionally I prefer Hitachi Hard Drives, but those are quite hard to find now, and I learned why from your video, (thank you very much!). Hitachi merged with Western Digital to make HGST. I just got an HGST drive a few months ago and so far, I haven't been impressed. The drives seem to be worse than WD and definitely worse than Hitachi Drives ever were. I've found that the HGST drives don't resist impact as well as Toshiba, WD, Hitachi or Seagate which is what killed my last two Enterprise 10TB HGST drives. It's also worth noting that I've had experience with most of these drives in a used condition as I mostly pull drives from old machines and rarely buy brand new drives.

Just thought I'd share what I've found with the rest of the community!

What this does not show
Is the average users computer
One person could be running a rtx4090 with blower style fan thing blowing hot air directly towards their drives
Another user may have fan infront of drive enclosure....

Someone may hav shittty psu

Someone maybe didnt use anti static wrist band and over time has caused buildup
Blahblah.dust
Heat

????

I used a sata cable not correctly plugged into my hdd once, and apparently that screwed up windows update for a lot of people then maybe, yea back then my computer was a part of uploading updates to other people and i was getting drive failures because
1) my cable wasnt plugged in properly
2) something wrong with the cable

It looks to be the sameish
Where wd has stopped most probably transition period to seagate

According to a report by cloud backup firm *Backblaze**, which analyzed the failure rates of 129,764 hard drives from HGST, Toshiba, and Seagate, the **Seagate 4TB ST4000DM000* had the highest *Annualized Failure Rate (AFR)* of *1.42%* in Q1 2020¹. However, it's worth noting that Backblaze has a lot of Seagate drives, so it makes more sense to look at the AFR, which is calculated as follows: AFR = (Drive Failures / (Drive Days / 366) * 100 ¹. The average AFR for the reporting period was 1.07 percent, the lowest since Backblaze started tracking it in 2013¹.

It's important to note that the data is from a specific period and may not be representative of the current state of hard drive reliability. Additionally, the sample size is limited to the drives used by Backblaze and may not be representative of the entire market¹.

I hope this information helps!

Source: Conversation with Bing, 04/02/2024

I think it was nikki or silvo that had a hgst drive that went sooooooo bad

my WD my passport 5tb started to get corrupted files so far my seagate 1 touch 5tb hdd experience is fine except for like early 2000 seagate got some issue for me

I tried those brand I don’t have any issues.

Consumer drives were not designed to run in racks; particularly large ones like backblaze. Enterprise drives are designed to deal with vibrations found in racks.

lol 14 minutes later and I can't draw any meaningful conclusions..

From my experience, Seagates are terrible, stick with WD. I had a Seagate that lasted about a year, my WD drives are 8 years old and are going strong.

Wow - I'm very happy to subscribe because you analyse data brilliantly. This was really helpful. Have been looking at Backblaze results for ages but struggled until now.

As Data Recovery Service provider since 25 years we always open disks. Enterprise hard disks are only having reliability.
Toshiba enterprise hard disks are having far better build quality and reliability, however this may change from model to model.

I ve been using Ultrastar/HGST drives for years now. They are quick and up to now none of them failed in my home lab. Fingers crossed of course. I thing the Ultrastar series from WD and the EXOS series from Seagate are both very reliable. Reason for sticking with WD/ultrastar is just historical for me

In 7 years running 5 Seagate 4 TB Iron drives in a Synology NAS, one of the five failed after 3 years, 4 months with bad sectors - shorts outsite the 3 years warrenty. One time after 7 years a drive power off (hang up), but can be reinstalled to the RAID again without an other fail. For the future I switch to Toshiba, because all Toshiba drives have 5 years warranty.

I don't buy 'made in China' mechanical drives. I don't buy 'Toshiba' drives because their models are made in China. Even before buying Seagate or WD drives, I make sure they are 'made in Thailand' drives. I also avoid 'made in Malaysia' drives.
I still have a 40GB 'made in Singapore' Seagate PATA drive which is 18+ year old, connected to a very old system. This drive is built like a tank. Its circuit is covered with a metal cover. I deliberately dropped it 3/4 times but it still runs. HD sentinel shows 100% health and performance.

The seagate drives used in 2013-2014 by backblaze were the trash seagate ST3000dm001, enterprise workload or not..

I can admit I am part of the Anti-Seagate due to past experiences.
What I experienced is, seagate from 1GB to 200GB lived forever.
250 and 320GB models 7200.9 or 7200.10 were fine.
EVERYTHING 320GB up to 2TB 7200.11, 7200.12 was absolute trash that would die within 6 month, get an RMA which was a 7200.12, dies again.
Barracudas were a bit better. I seen some last forever and some die quick deaths.


This hurt lots of businesses.
I kept on hearing stories of Seagate failures for the 4tb up to 8tb.
Stopped following since.
I guess it's time to give them another chance for their new Ironwolf enterprise series. Their pricing is excellent.

Were all the HDDs at Backblaze in use under the same conditions regarding temperature, humidity, and vibration?

for some reason there's a lot of pops and glitches in your mic audio

bro cam u tell me does HDD enclosure may cause of hdd failure. i means can it badly impact hdd to eventually fail it.

Very informative, thank you. I'm considering getting a Toshiba MG Series drive in the sales as they seem good value for money.
Western Digital has always been my go-to since 1997 when my first drive was a 2GB Caviar. Never actually had one of theirs fail on me in all that time after going through a lot of computers and drives, but have had at least 3 Seagate drives of various sizes and a Fujitsu fail that I can remember. All anecdotal of course, but it goes to show how people can become glued to one manufacturer.
Best of luck with your channel, you deserve more subscribers. 👍

What about PRO vs non pro disk choices ? Great info

Thank you, looking to upgrade my NAS and really good info

Excellent. Cheers. Will be looking at replacing my (nearly) 5 year-old Iron Wolf Pros next year, so nice to know Segate don't do too badly. Can't say I have had any complaints so far.

WD is the worst crap imo. I don't buy them anymore after 8 "failures".

Very useful video thanks