The conventional hard drives offer large storage capacities with a very competitive cost price per Gbyte is clearly lower than in the case of SSDs, especially for increasing capacity, but some brands are more trouble than others.
That’s what reports backBlaze reports every year, a company that offers an online storage service and that every year studies the performance of the disks you have on your servers. Western Digital is the worst performer according to that report.
Manufacturers under consideration
The report includes a total of 71,939 hard disk drives from different manufacturers that were running not only that year, but had also been installed in previous years on their servers. By analyzing the number of failures and dividing it by the number of days that had been running, the failure rate was obtained.
Analyzing performance by manufacturer, it was concluded that ** WDC was the worst-off ** with a 3.88% average failure rate on all disks (of different models and capacities) they had installed. Seagate, with 2.65% was the second worst, while HGST stood out especially for its low failure rate, of only 0.60% in total.
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There were not too many differences if these rates were analyzed for capacities, although the 5 TBs seemed somewhat more likely than the rest with a 2.22% failure rate. Those of 3 TB were the most reliable in this sense: 1.40% of failures.
These are the worst and best models according to BackBlaze
If we talk about specific models, the worst that behaved differently was the Seagate ST4000DX000 4 TB, a unit that came to have a failure rate of 13.57%. The WDC WD60EFRX 6 TB also did not perform too well with a 5.49% failure rate. The third worst rated was the Toshiba DT01ACA300 of 3 TB, with a rate of 4.32%.
There is nevertheless good news for buyers looking for discs, because the 8TB HG728080ALE600 HGST, the 8TB Seagate ST8000NM0055 and the 4TB Toshiba MD040ABA400V did not have a single failure in their trial periods, than in two cases (HGST and Toshiba) exceeded 20 months.
Obviously, these data come from a single study and this does not mean that they are definitive, but if there is a scenario in which these discs can show their reliability, it is this. BackBlaze is precisely known for making very good reports from the world of storage, so it is a good reference if you are thinking of buying a traditional hard drive.