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Peer-Reviewed Study Ranks HGST Most Reliable Hard Drive Brand, Toshiba Least Reliable
Key points
- HGST drives failed at 41% of Seagate's rate in the study.
- Toshiba drives had a 107% failure rate compared to Seagate.
- Failure rates increased by 2.1% for each additional degree Celsius.
- Higher capacity drives showed lower failure rates by 3.4% per terabyte.
New Reliability Analysis
Economists Christoph Siemroth and Yeomyung Park published a peer-reviewed IEEE study re-evaluating 12 years of Backblaze's public hard drive data. The study analyzed 443,156 hard drives and over 1.66 million drive-years from 2013 through Q2 2025.
The researchers found that HGST drives exhibited the lowest failure rates, approximately 41% of Seagate's rate, when controlling for age, capacity, form factor, and operating temperature. WD drives failed at about 52% of Seagate's rate, while Toshiba had the highest failure rate at 107% compared to Seagate.
Methodology and Adjustments
The study addressed limitations in Backblaze's quarterly reports, which compare drives available at the time, potentially skewing results by pitting older drives against newer ones. The new analysis accounted for the varying ages of manufacturers' fleets, as HGST led new installations in 2014, Seagate from 2015-2020, Toshiba in 2023, and WD in 2024.
An additional 146,943 drives, about 31% of the sample, were removed from the dataset without failing, primarily due to capacity upgrades, which was also considered in the analysis.
Age and Environmental Factors
Toshiba drives showed a significant increase in monthly failure rates, more than quadrupling after 60 months of service. Between 50 and 100 months, Toshiba units failed at five to six per 1,000 drives per month, while other brands generally remained at or below 2.5. Seagate's failure rate started higher for new drives but remained stable with age.
The models also indicated that each additional degree Celsius in average drive temperature increased failure rates by 2.1%, accumulating to roughly 23% over a 10-degree Celsius rise. Conversely, each extra terabyte of capacity reduced failure rates by about 3.4%, possibly due to advancements like helium-filled enclosures and newer head-fabrication processes in higher-capacity designs.
Scope and Limitations
The dataset primarily consists of enterprise drives used in Backblaze's data centers, meaning these findings may not directly apply to consumer-grade hard drives. Backblaze does not record comparable workload data across manufacturers, and only 0.52% of sampled drives operated for over a decade, indicating that the estimates reflect short- to medium-term reliability.
✨ This summary was generated by AI from the outlets' reporting listed below. It is not independently verified and may contain errors — check the original sources. How BrevFeed works →
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Reporting from
A new IEEE study re-analyzed 12 years of Backblaze hard drive data, covering over 443,000 drives, and found that HGST drives had the lowest failure rates, while Toshiba drives had the highest. This analysis adjusted for factors like drive age, capacity, form factor, and operating temperature, providing a more refined comparison of reliability across brands.