Which hard drives are most reliable? BackBlaze, the cloud backup company, uses thousands of drives and keeps track of which makes and models fail. Here are their results for 2022 through 2024 showing the reliability of the brands they use. Remember, this is based on how many drives in each brand BackBlaze had to replace because of failures, so the graph below represents real world data.
In previous reports, HGST drives had very low failure rates, but as the graph shows, in the middle of 2024 there was an upswing in failures for HGST drives. In the past, Seagate drives had relatively higher failure rates than other brands, but the graph shows improving reliability for Seagate drives.Toshiba’s drives have been fairly consistent, with relatively low failure rates.
The champion, however, is WDC (Western Digital, whose failure rates (the red line in the graph) is below all others…meaning fewer failures.
That’s why we typically recommend WD or Western Digital drives to our clients, and use them ourselves.
