Failure Rate Analysis – Best 10Tb+ hard drives: Seagate, Western Digital or Toshiba?
Failure Rate Analysis – Best 10Tb+ hard drives: Seagate, Western Digital or Toshiba?
I perform an in depth AFR (annualized failure rate) analysis on 10Tb, 12Tb, 14Tb and 16Tb hard disks using 230,000 drives SMART data as a data source. We find out which manufacturers perform best, and which models are the lemons to avoid. All these vendors state their drives have an AFR of 0.35%, but who is really giving the accurate picture?
Video on the broader analysis of 430k drives over 10 years of data : https://youtu.be/ipBVdCAJ9AY
Enterprise vs NAS disks? Which should you choose? : https://youtu.be/UFDF39TRsl0
Link to the BackBlaze data source : https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive-test-data
You can support me at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/sometechguy
Thank you to everyone for watching and hope you enjoy the content!
I have disliked Maxtor enough that I have never even considered buying Seagate
Why can’t we have an easy way of buying drives from different batches. So it might reduce the possibility of mass failures in a raid. Just a thought. I guess you could spread your order over multiple vendors.
Don’t buy a mechanical drive HDD instead get a SSD, they are silent, longer life, much faster read/write typically ranging between 460mps to 580mps transfer R/W speeds.
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14:13 people keep rewatching because you can’t tell what the hell he is saying.
I had two completely different Seagate drives around 2008 and both failed within 2 years. I’ve had many WD’s since then, and have never had a single failure.
One note: One of the most important brands for reliability is actually the brand servicing the drive. Ie: you. Your usage of the drive massively influences its lifespan. If you keep the drives turned off for most of its life it’ll last significantly longer. I personally recommend buffering them with SSDs, and only turning on your drives very infrequently (one a week or month is ideal).
I made a video now
I’ve had seagate drives for almost eight years now, 2, 2tb drives they’re not that bad.Neither of them have failed.
I wonder what’s best for the home user to archive their most important data (photos, documents, obscure software)? Is it an HDD that you store the data on and then don’t use and never physically move around?
All this data I’d for server drives that are constantly being written to, I guess if you’re a home user the drives are going to last longer
I’ve been running (two) Seagate 16TB Exos (SATA) drives, (ST16000NM001G-2KK103), 24/7 for 5 years now. It’s used as an NFS/media server running all the time, on XFS file system, and writing periodically, and rebooting only to upgrade OS and/or firmware.
They started at 30% capacity used, and now about 60% capacity used. They’ve survived several power outages and still running great.
The ONLY thing I’m upset about with Seagate is that they didn’t have their 32TB drive out back then.
I have a 4TB WD external drive that still kicking for my Plex server after 8 years.
summary
there is no difference between them.
waaaw
Any data on dependency RPM with Reliability. 5200, 5400, 5640, 5900, 7200 rpms ?
The video is of supreme quality but, the 1st 6 minutes are very boring but awesome at the same time. As it make the video borderline empirical. So I really wish that the videos will be segmented because sometimes you only need the conclusion. Other than that it was awesome and informative and useful. Thanks for all the effort you have put into this!
This is great information. I wonder if you can do the same analysis for NVMe and SSD.
Very interesting data.
I will definitely be avoiding Toshiba and Seagate in the feature based on this quality control data.
I’ve had bad luck with Seagate drives. Your data confirms my suspicions about their reliability.
Horrible color selection. Also Dark Theme; does your eyes don’t hurt yet? Do you use sunglasses while operating your computer?
It’s not just about rotation, but also actuations. Actuations (head movement) creates vibrations which adds spindle bearing wear – in addition to the actuator itself of course.
It would also be useful to know what constitutes a failure, presumably early on it’s mechanical problems, or it flat out doesn’t work at all (like won’t spin up) – while later it shifts to high soft error counts and rapidly growing bad block maps?
Avoid Seagate, I’ve got ironwolf pro just a year ago and its now showing at 18% critical health
As a former IBM/ HGST employee, I am happy to see that our work is still bearing high quality fruit.
I have a Seagate EXOS with 12 TB, and a Toshiba Enterprise 16TB. My next unit will be definitely and without doubt, TOSHIBA. Just so much better, and silent and quite cheap among the other vendors.
all these are china made? useless analysis
I’ve always had good luck with Western Digital drives over the years.
Two things, Datacenter use and Home use.. what’s the usecase off is this information/data to me as a home user..
How do cumulative numbers smooth the curve? Not sure on that.
Since 1987, Seagate have never fail to crash on me. There are times brand like Conner, Maxtor or IBM drives that are DOA but these are one off. I never had a DOA Seagate drives before but it will always fail me in less than a year.
Fujitsu, Toshiba, Hitachi fails me after normally 3 years or more. So left with one other brand that is the most reliable. Won’t mention it’s name.
Just dont buy SEAGATE and you’ll be OK
Using Enterprise 16TB its ToshMG08>HGST>WD>Seagate.
Many years ago I was burnt badly by Seacrate, never again. WD for life after that and never disappointed.
So thats why me dad always insisted on buying wd drives.
Ive still got some from my childhood computer. Never had one break. Not a single drive in my family has ever broken.
A huge thanks to you and to Backblaze for making this data available!
the chances are if your watching this video its because youtube is forcing you to do so
As 30 years ago, I would always go for Seagate. They acquired so many great technologies, as by Samsung, Conner, IBM and so on. Never one failed.
Seagate harddrives failed the most for me. 3 in only 5 years. Then Toshiba and HGST had no failures at all so far and even SMART values are all close to 100%. Have had 3 Seagate, 3 Toshiba and 2 HGST drives in the past 5 years. Personally I avoid Seagate like its the plague nowadays.
Have you tried to leverage the new LLM tools to analyze all the data?
Can try NoteBookLM by google. Id try that. Maybe Claude AI from Anthropic paid. Or, Open AI’s Chat GPT paid. If you try Claude, and maybe Note Book LM, could find some interesting things the human eye does not easily notice.
Is it just me, but I can not see the difference between those colors enough to find out which drive is which.
Hitachi, the industrial ones. I’ve had very good luck with them, even refurbished ones. They last longer than any Seagate/WD/Toshiba ive ever used. I don’t mean HGST either I mean Hitachi, before they labelled them HGST. The 1-4tb models, I havent used the drives bigger than this yet but this video seems to show they havent changed too much.
I’ve done everything I can think of—reformatted (both light and thorough), disabled unnecessary services, tweaked startup programs, modified registry settings, and ran multiple diagnostics—but the performance issues persist. From startup, disk usage is stuck at 100%, freezing is random and can last up to 30 minutes or more, and even simple tasks like opening a browser or clicking are painfully slow.
Lately, I’ve resorted to pressing and holding the power button to force a shutdown because the system freezes for so long that normal shutdown options are useless. I’m starting to wonder if my hard drive could be failing, even though CrystalDiskInfo shows its health as "Good." Could it still have undetected issues?
This laptop is more than just a device to me—it’s a gift from my grandmother, who’s no longer with us, and I can’t imagine replacing it. I’m determined to keep it running, but I need guidance to figure out what’s wrong.
Here’s what I’ve tried so far:**
Disabled services via CMD:
Disabled Sysmain, Connected Devices Platform Service (CDPSvc), and Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS).
Left Connected Devices Platform User Service_9e718 (CDPUserSvc_9e718) enabled.
Edited Registry:
Modified ClearPageFileAtShutdown in hkey_local_machinesystemcurrent control setcontrolsession managermemory management (set to 1).
Ran Diagnostic Tests:
RAM: Passed all four tests using mdsched.
HDD: Checked with CrystalDiskInfo—health status shows "Good."
HDD Speed Test: Results show average read/write speeds but still unsure if performance degrades under load.
Results:
Disk usage remains at 100% since startup, even after these tasks.
Memory usage hovers at 66%.
A random error occasionally appears: “AcerRegistrationBackGround Task Has Stopped Working.”
Additional Details:
Model: Acer Aspire 7 (A715-71G)
Specs: Core i5-7300HQ, GTX 1050 2GB, 8GB DDR4 RAM (single-channel),
Storage: WD 1TB HDD <————- STORAGE BRAND
OS: Windows 10 Home (fully updated)
My Suspicions:
I’m increasingly concerned that the hard drive could be the root of these issues. Although basic tests show it’s functioning, I’ve read that early signs of failure might not always show up in simple diagnostics. Perhaps the disk is struggling under load or has specific sectors degrading over time. Could it explain the freezing, high disk usage, and slow responsiveness?
Alternatively, could this be linked to the single-channel RAM setup, thermal throttling, or dust accumulation inside the laptop? I haven’t tried cleaning it or upgrading to dual-channel RAM yet.
I’m at a crossroads and don’t want to replace parts unnecessarily without pinpointing the issue. Any insights into how to confirm or rule out hard drive failure—or if it’s something else entirely—would mean the world to me.
Thank you in advance.
You’re killing me smalls!
I have used hundreds of drives over the years and I can count on one hand how many Western Digital, Hitachi and Toshiba drives have failed. There are not enough numbers in my vocabulary to say how many Seagate drives I have had fail! Seagate drives are the most pathetic drives on the planet and I would not trust that crap ware for a security monitoring system!
Comment4da-algo: Appreciate all the work u put into this for your fellow nerds to use and enjoy 😉
I knew I was not imagining it. Segate drives tend to fail.
so many refurbished ones for cheap, this data really helps with making a decision! 😀
do you have something similar for consumer level comparisons? like the WD My book 16TB vs Seagate Expansion 16TB External Hard Drive HDD – USB 3.0?
Sorry, I need that B to run for abouy 10 years, not these short life spans that would like last a year or 3, if i want to store my photos and make it last longer with bigger space, why bother if they’re just gonna break and all my stuff is gone.
Then there’s the WD Red controversy. Not in this data set. Where bad marketing decisions kill trust.