Scientists Studied Over 400K Hard Drives, And This Major Tech Brand's Failed The Most

A study on IEEE Xplore analyzed 443,156 HDDs from four brands using Backblaze data from 2013–2025. Toshiba had more failures than Seagate (107% of baseline), while HGST and Western Digital were more reliable — 39–41% and 51–52% respectively.

• Toshiba: 5–6 failures per 1000 drives per month at age 50–100 months
• HGST — most reliable brand: 39–41% of Seagate's failure rate
• A 10 °C temperature increase raises failure rate by 23.1%
• Each additional 1 TB capacity reduces failures by 3.4%