Failure Rate Analysis - Best 10Tb+ hard drives: Seagate, Western Digital or Toshiba? 

WD and hitachi is famous for durability for years already. Never buy seagate, even rarely used disk breaks i had 6 of my seagate HDD broke

I have no idea where you've gotten your luck, but I've been running 6 Seagate's in a raid with 24/7 operation for over 5 years now, the drives I've had fail the most are WD

Pff... I just bought an Toshiba MG 20TB 3.5" Enterprise to store movies on it. Should i return it ?

The WD Ultrastar in this example are only rebranded HGST Ultrastar, so they are only newer HGST models. So HGST were always the best. In fact there were no original WD models in this test.

@@ACFUN34 i wouldn't say to do it. i have a couple of hgst 2tb drives in raid 1 with over 50k hours and no smart errors or spinning noises or whatever. Depends on what NAS are you using it in.

Appreciate the feedback and comment. 😊

Thank you, I appreciate this! The data from Backblaze is fantastic and contains a lot of detail and a huge volume of stats, its over 410 million rows, each with around 35 columns of good usable data, with many more that isn't so useful. They also did a great job in keeping the data pretty clean, I worked with really dirty datasets before that require a great deal of clean up but the BB data is highly consistent. But it still takes a lot of work to extract the trend data and aggregate it up so you can get the AFR stats. Glad you found it useful.

Thank you, appreciate the feedback and the likes on this comment. Glad people found this valuable. 🥳

@kevinlsims7330 curious how long it took you to write that comment with all the unnecessary capitalization

WD used be my worst nightmare. I had a lot of their 80GB drives and every single one failed. The warranty replacements failed. It was a disaster. But flash forward 15 years or whatever it is and I ended up running WD NVME in everything and now the 10TB HGST HE drives in my NAS. Mostly because they absorbed Hitachi, my old go-to. But I've been quite happy with current NVME and spinning drives and SanDisk for memory cards. Samsung, Crucial, and Silicon Power have all let me down. Would never use those again. Hynix has been good to me.

That's impressive, which model is it? 😎

@@sometechguy ST96812AS 60GB 2,5” I actually think when it comes to 2,5” drives Seagate been the generally best. And WD when it comes to 3,5”. Worst ever is Hitatchi Travelstar for 2,5. And the IBM Deathstar lol. I had very bad luck with drives in general but I also seen very long lived ones in my days too

Hi, how do you remap the drive?

@@Helios.vfx. Typically a normal drive will automatically re-map sectors when needed by itself through its built in Smart function. You can monitor this using software such as Gsmart control and Crystaldiskinfo. You can manually do a sector scan of a drive and search for bad sectors using Gsmart control or Windows/programs to check the drive for problems before they eventually get big enough to cause major problems. When a drive is getting worn out and it re-map a lot of sectors or mark many as problematic it is a sign of eminent failure and you should replace the drive. For example: reallocated sector count. This is the value of successful remaps that the hard drive done for you both on mechanical and SSDs. A value higher than 0 is a sign of age or increasing risk of failure. Current pending sector count, this value indicates the drive have problems with sectors but it is waiting for a suitable time to re-map it or check again. It may also be that it is failing to do a re-map of these sectors hence it is a pending problematic sector. Increasing values here have a big chance of damaged data as data is often still stored in these inaccessible sectors. Uncorrectable sector count. A value here indicates the drive have problems with sectors and could not correct them with the built in smart. This is often caused by locked data due to file systems on the drive. Your data is at eminent risk of failure as your drive cannot correct damaged sectors. If your drive have all the 3 combined in higher values you can be assured you have to backup immediately because your data is at maximum risk of complete failure. Monitoring a drives Smart is a very good thing to do at all times as all hard drives are constantly keeping track of their own health at all times

dude, whats the model?

Mechanical storage now starts from 4TB up. Personaly I use Adata 8200 pro as main disk, Cruical MX500 for linux, and 4 old 1TB hdd Model: Hitachi HDT721010SLA360 x2, Model: WDC WD1002FAEX-00Y9A0 x2, mechanical drives have about 5.5 years of sumed power on working time and no signs of fatigue so far. In work we have some Synology nas + Synology drives (no idea about model of drives inside) and WD8003FFBX WD Red pro for asustor nas. @@arshkarim_

For the smaller capacity drives, I have a video that compares enterprise drives to desktop drives for failures, found here : ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-l_YqdVGcC0o.html. But the short answer is that desktop drives are not generally statistically more likely to fail than enterprise, despite the lower warranty. But the warranty of course allows you to get a replacement for a failure. Yes its true that Seagate appears to have a higher failure rate than HGST (and recent WD drives), and Toshiba can be better also, but its also true that it varies by model, and any drive can fail, or last years. The failure rates over all however, are low, typically 0.5% to 1.5% AFR, meaning that there is around 1% chance that a drive will fail in any given year. So I personally wouldn't avoid Seagate and I have a lot of Seagate drives and have had a good experience. But I would do the following things. 1) Make sure that you do not have 1 copy of data you can't lose on any single disk or in any single drive array. If you care, have a backup. For things I really care about, I have more than 1 backup and keep one somewhere different. 2) If a drive shows signs of failure, replace it. 3) Buy base on pricing, as well as its reliability. I am not saying buy known problem drives, but don't pay huge premiums for specific drives, because any can fail and see point 1. 4) Treat spinning drives properly. Secure them when in use, and don't move them. Don't have them hanging around loose in chassis. 5) Ideally use a UPS to protect systems, especially NAS's. This will result in less unscheduled shutdowns. 6) Be cautious about where you get drives from. I personally buy from trusted retailers where I believe the warranty is valid and its a new drive, the drive hasn't been shucked, removed from a system or 'refurbished'. SSDs are not better than Spinning disks. They are better for certain things. Cheap, long term storage is a good use case for spinning disks and its a more stable medium also for long term data retention. Good luck!

Same. Been in the industry 20+ years. I've built a lot of PC's over that time and one thing i can tell you is that when Seagates fail, they fail HARD. What i mean by that, is that, one day all is well and then suddenly the drives start to go downhill very quickly. Seek error climb drastically and if you don't notice it in time or haven't some active SMART Monitoring keeping an eye on things, you'll have a dead drive in no time at all. In Data Centers, this isn't a huge deal, as they have hard drive redundancy as part of their model, but for home users, not as much. I stopped buying Seagate's a long time ago (i can remember when they bought out Maxtor and their plants, so they could increase their warranties from 2 years to 5). I stick with Western Digital personally, for no other reason, that when those drives start to fail, it's a noticeable, gradual downward curve, not a cliff edge.

depends on the budget. If you want cheap and cheerful, then go for a Western Digital Blue drive. If you need a bit more speed (like storing your steam library on), then a Western digital Black drive should work nicely. @@arshkarim_

I have 5 WD drives working from 5 to 16 years, none of them died expect one had errors because i dropped it on the floor but i make partitions around the broken area and it's still working.

Thank you for the positive feedback. When it comes to failure data, especially comparing many devices I think its really hard to get a good picture of this without visualizations, as there are so many variables to include. It did take some time to put together, and structuring the data also takes time, so I really appreciate the comment that it was useful.

And thank you for the comment and feedback. Glad I did a reasonable job and thanks for the sub!

Thank you, appreciate the comment and glad it was valuable. 😃

Thank you and welcome. Small but growing quickly! Appreciate the support.

Glad you enjoy it! Thank you

Appreciate it, and thanks for watching. 🙌

When I am the server room, I always carry a notebook and pen. 😑 But actually, back in the day when patching cables, I really did. But not sure it looked quite like the b-roll.

Be fair.. notebook and pen is by far easiest anbd quickest way.

@@XantheFIN I take photos personally, much quicker and has no transcription errors. (though sometimes they are fuzzy)

Somebody please make an app

@@yw1971 I'm genuinely curious about this. What exactly are you checking when looking at the racks? Is it a visual indicator to tell if a drive is down? How big of a problem is this that it can't be automated and/or checked remotely? Thanks.

You are welcome, glad you liked it.

Yes! I believe this is why Backblaze publish it and why others should to. I am sure it’s leverage over the hard disk suppliers to do the right thing by them also. Backblaze also do a great job at keeping the dataset relatively clean. It didn’t require too much clean up to ensure consistency.

@@sometechguy I wonder if we could write an app to monitor drives in Win/Linux machines around the world? That could really grow this dataset. You'd just have to trust the use to determine is a drive failed vs removed. Could work. Would be fairly easy to write.

Why Raid 1? I use Raid 5. Only had one WD disk failing and with the 5y warranty, I had a brand new one from WD within days, rebuild the raid and was good to go again. Amazing service.

Thanks for sharing your experiences. The warranty will depend on the drive class, and has varied over time. All the manufacturers appear to offer 5 years warranty currently on current enterprise class disks, but NAS class disks, surveillance and desktop vary. For example the Toshiba S300 Surveillance Drives have a 3 year warranty, and their desktop P300 have 2 year limited warranty currently based on their datasheets. I think generally you will find similar warranties between them on competitive products.

No problem 👍

Thank you 🙏

Thank you, appreciate you taking the time to comment. 🙏

Thank you, appreciate this. You can review drives for performance and noise, but can’t really do this for reliability until the drives have got to, or close to their warranty period. And even then, doing this for one or a few drives isn’t very useful. So I think this is the lost useful way of seeing how there drives really perform in a real world scenario, even though BackBlaze may be a harsher environment than some but that is probably a good thing to make sure the drives are subjected to some real work. Thanks for commenting!

👍

Thank you 👍

My pleasure, and thank you for the feedback.

Thank you, appreciated. 😎

Sorry, sounds unlucky. But thank you for checking out my channel, and I hope the video was useful in helping you compare the manufacturers and products. I have some other videos that look at different aspects of the failure data, but I have not yet covered the disks under 2Tb. I think a lot of people still use these in PCs or for offline backup, so I will take a look that data and see if it provides useful information that's worth digging into. Good luck with the new disk!

@@sometechguy Sorry, meant 2 TB, not GB.

@@sometechguyReviewing the 1TB and 2TB 3.5” HDD would be great. For instance: I have almost 10 of them: 5x 2TB (HGST being 2x in a NAS Raid0), 2x NAS 1TB (Maxtor and brand?), 1TB USB (Bufallo). And several (~20 units) of 2.5” from Seagate and WD, ranging from 160GB to 1TB, but mostly in the 320GB-640GB range. ​​⁠Reviewing the 1TB and 2TB 3.5” HDD would be great. For instance: I have almost 10 of them: 5x 2TB (HGST being 2x in a NAS Raid0), 2x NAS 1TB (Maxtor and brand?), 1TB USB (Bufallo). And several (~20 units) of 2.5” from Seagate and WD, ranging from 160GB to 1TB, but mostly in the 320GB-640GB range. As most of these are now “off-line” HDD, for storage or backup, expect for the ones used in LAPTOP’s main HDD (after ~5Y, being replaced by SSD), their actual accumulated hour is typically small (guess to be in the range 1K~5K Hr), but 90% were purchased in 2009~2011. Thank you for sharing such great compilation of information.

@@sigerlion8608 Its common knowledge that seagate makes unreliable drives (they are hit or miss), and for some reason it is considered taboo to say this even though we all know it. Usually when you say this, you will get a response along the lines of (oh well its not just seagate, all drives have a chance to fail". Trust me, even though any drive has a chance to fail, seagate drives have the highest chance. I feel like seagate has a real life failure rate of 40% after around 3 years but people don't want to admit it.

@@angrysocialjusticewarrior Yeah, I barely used the drive. Only uploaded files every few months. Kept it in a cool place. Never bumped or dropped it, and it still failed before reaching 2 years.

You're welcome 👍

Agrees. Used to buy Hitachi drives and now buy the HGST WD drives and they've been extremely reliable. Knock on wood. WD NVME Black has also been excellent. Really hope they maintain quality after the current split.

Yes, I've been a long time WD user, because all this time, to me, they've proven to be most reliable, overall. In my box of antiques I have one of the first SATA drives, a WD1600, from 2003. I can plug it in and use it if I like, even now. Still works perfectly thanks to the FD bearing. In fact, all the WD drives still work and I have a lot of them, accumulated over the years. HGST also performs very well, and Seagate...well...I've had plenty of those conk out on me. Quantum drives never failed me, until Seagate raped them. Never had IBM drives, they tended to have bad batches. When it was bought by Hitachi, quality went up dramatically (This is now HGST). Moderately satisfied with Toshiba 3.5 inch drives, their 2.5 inch laptop drives are exceedingly good.

RAID is not a backup

@@m1stertim I think you missed the s there at the end. 😉

Thanks for leaving the comment. While, due to the way failure distribution works there can be different experiences, its good to hear that a lot of people share the experiences that the data shows, especially those that have experience with higher drive volumes. Appreciate you sharing.

Unfortunately, any disk can die and for different reasons, so backups are always important. I get a variety of comments on videos about various vendors and people are most likely to hate on products that have failed on them understandably, but WD seem to have broad respect for their HDDs at least, and the data seems to support that. So yes, your gut isn't failing you! Thanks for commenting and sharing. 😎

Thank you 👍

Thanks for the sub! It all helps with growing the channel and getting better reach, so I appreciate it.

For sure, certain drives have personalities. 😁

If it was an Ultrastar model, that's the old HGST design - WD finally got to merge their HGST purchase from about a DECADE ago into the company a couple years ago. Most reliable drives on the market overall, and WD seems to have been smart enough to have the HGST staff keep designing that line and NOT mess up their production.

@@bricefleckenstein9666 i would love to buy hgst again, but Cant find it… so hgst is now WD Gold or how?

I don't believe any of the manufacturers embed this data in the serial number or model number, at least not in a way thats easily accessible. I would love to have that data to include in the comparison, as people comment that the country of origin is related to the quality and reliability. A lot of manufacturer happens in Thailand still, but I think there was some diversification following the issues with the devastating floods that hit that country and seriously impact HDD availability for some time.

This is good to hear. The data shows they are excellent drives, and I did some other analysis also comparing the manufacturers more broadly and HGST and the WD descendants come out glowing.

I don't think SMART has any stats that tell you that, and the data is basically daily SMART extracts along with data on when drives died. So you can see when a drive first appeared, when it disappeared and if it disappeared due to a failure or not. But drives themselves don't record usage, other than number of power down events etc, for which there are very few, probably maintenance. That said, these will be in chassis in large arrays, so I would imagine they are being accessed pretty much 24x7.

Ya, I guess we can view their info as a torture test weeding out the weakest drives. All good info... thanks!

Thanks and welcome! I did make the following video that covers the 4-8 TB disks in the data set : ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-l_YqdVGcC0o.html it has all the drives and also compares enterprise failure rates to desktop as this dataset has a pretty good mix of both. Hopefully it has useful info you for in it. 🙂

@@sometechguy it’s super useful. Thanks so much

This is about how likely a number of different hard drives are to fail after x amount of time. It's useful when picking a hard drive to buy for reliability.

Totally agree. He should remove this video and I motion for RU-vid to ban his posts. Ridiculous

​@@njdxnjdx What the heck are *you* talking about?

Good to hear. They have a smaller market share and there are less vocal defenders and critics of them. But generally, the feedback seems to be positive. The fact that you don't hear a lot of people complaining about them has to be a good sign. 👍

@@sometechguy I also have the toshiba;s HWF. 2x8TB that show up on backblaze's charts. So far no fails. But they are extremely LOUDER than the 16tb's I have now. I also have to mention that My WD 10EZEX the legendary 1TB is 10years old and still working like hell

Hi and thanks for watching and commenting also. I put out a video a couple of weeks ago which covers exactly this I think, found here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-icNbexYV3M4.html. I hope this gives all the specific data and context to help. The TL:DR is that WD disks appear to currently be the most reliable enterprise disks, and although the available data for these disks only goes back 2.5-3.5 years or so, it appears to closely follow the past behavior or the Ultrastar range when it was branded under HGST. The small caveat is just around price point and availability, but I just bought some 20Tb Ultrastar DC560s myself as they were actually cheaper at the time than Exos 20Tb disks. Toshiba Enterprise Capacity 20Tb disks were cheaper still, but the current data seems to look great for those Ultrastars, so I went with them. But of course, price varies day to day and by location, so your mileage there may vary. Good luck with the NAS build.

@@sometechguy HGST / WD "Ultrastar" have been my go-to models for about a decade. Followed by Toshiba enterprise models.

Pleasure, thanks for watching!

The use case is 24x7, but the test data is actually calculated against power_on_hours anyway and not elapsed time. So its based on continuous use, and because the power on hours lines up with the drive ages closely, its clear they are powered on for approx 24hours a day on average. I am sure there are brief maintenance windows. But in terms of the stated MTBF on the drives, its based on assumed workload for the drive. For enterprise drives in this video, they are all 24x7, but MTBF on desktop drives is often based on numbers around 8 hours a day.

It varies over time and by disk model. But Seagate often have a price advantage over WD, with Toshiba varying. And yes, I am sure the price vs reliability is going to be part of the decision, especially for customers who carry spares.

Thank you 👍

I prefer to stay away from telling people what they should do, and instead provide data to make their own informed choice from. The overall reliability of the drive is not the only factor, price availability and reputation of the vendor is also something that varies over time and location. Some people are not interested in the detail and just want to be told which to buy, others will want the data and make their own choices. So its a balance. But I take the feedback that the conclusions could be more concise. Creating content is about learning and improving with each video, so this feedback is constructive and useful. Thank you for that!

Yes, no matter which brand you buy or how good they are, they can fail and will fail. And if you are planning for those failures, it can then make sense not to pay a high premium for the most proven reliability also. A lot of people share their bad experiences, and more than most it seems about Seagate. And though the data shows they are probably more likely to fail, I don't think the numbers are too outrageous, and it will come down to statistics. Personally, I have had many years of good experience with Seagate also.

This was a long time ago. A representative for WD talked a bit about the test and quality of different drives. He told me they had tested the cheaper drives to the same standard as the professional drives. The reason they put so much effort in the cheaper drives was that at the volumes they shipped a single failing cheap drive would eat up the income for something like ten other drives. Meanwhile a professional drive that failed and had to be replaced would only eat up the income for something like five or six other drives of the same kind. So the reliability of the cheap drives were actually more important financially. It kind of broke my idea about how the big drive manufacturers worked. We kept selling enterprise drives to our customers even after that. It wasn't worth shaking the tree that hard.

Thank you 👍

There is a short and long answer. Short Answer: WD appear to be producing more reliable drives over the last few years. And across the models I analyzed, that seems a solid trend. I did some other videos on this as well, and the data seems to robustly support that, even if you slice it different ways. Long Answer: Drive reliability varies by model, and its all statistical based on the available sample. So any drive can fail, but the data indicates the likelihood for each model. Also, the 10Tb models analyzed in this data set, may not be the ones you get today. Actually, you can pick up 10Tb from different model lines and reliability could vary, for example between an Exos X10 10Tb and X18 10Tb. But taken in aggregate across a very large sample, WD appear to provide the most reliable drives. Its also worth noting that 'most reliable' doesn't mean the best drive to buy. Price is going to be a consideration, as well as how long you plan to keep the drive, and your trust in the brand as a whole. Support and warranty is also important, though I don't think any of these manufacturers have problems with their warranty, as long as you buy from an approved reseller.

Thank you for the comment, and especially appreciate the Superthanks. 🙌

Personally I love mining data to find hidden information, but it isn't for everyone. 😁 Thanks for checking it out!

This might be worth a deeper look at. It’s complex as there are lots of smart measurements, each with an unclear correlation to drive failure. Some are likely more correlated but the numbers increment differently, so hard to compare one directly to another. But given the size of the data set, there could be some good indicators hidden in here waiting to be found.

Ah yes, the good old Quantum Big Foot. I remember those. I'm not surprised one lasted this long, as computer components back then were way over-engineered. These days, they engineer them 'just enough' to last until after the warranty expires. They've almost got it down to an art form.

The Enterprise options (Exos X16 and Toshiba Enterprise Capacity MG06) will come with 5 year warranties, which is a positive but will be a bit noisier if its for a PC. So depends where the PC will be running if the noise is a consideration. The S300 and the S300 Pro will come with a 3 year warranty I believe, and will be a bit quieter, the S300 doesn't come in a 10Tb AFAIK, so you would need the pro version to get that capacity, and the Pro is a 7200RPM drive like the X16 and MG06, where the S300 non-pro is a 5400 RPM drive. You could look at the N300 also, which is a NAS drive. I don't think there is a lot between them. The X16 seemed like one of Seagate's better models, and the Tosh drives also are good. So it probably comes down to price, warranty period and maybe if the noisier drive will be a problem for you if its running 24x7. But the usual caveat is that any drive can fail, so no matter what you choose, that can happen and plan accordingly. 😉 Hope this helps you make your choice!

tnx, im just skeptical about Seagate drivers over the 10 years 3x6TB ones died on me.

@@sometechguy The Toshiba drives are loud, I am using the 2x X300 Pro I don't know how they compare to the N series, but they are pretty loud, honestly the X18 EXOS drives(Both are 16TB) while they are a little loud they are not actually that bad for a PC, I am using a Lian Li Dynamic Mini so results may vary depending on case, If you are using something like a Be Quiet Dark Pro case you are probably not going to hear anything.

It looks like there may not be price per terabyte parity for SSD vs HDD for quite a few years yet. HDDs are still keeping ahead and greater density on NAND comes with challenges for performance and durability. So for now, SSD for performance, HDD for low cost volume. I have some content on SSDs and SSD vs HDD planned. Thanks for watching and commenting. 🙂