If you need a hard drive, which do you buy? Seagate? Western Digital (WDC)? Toshiba? HGST? BackBlaze, the cloud backup company, buys lots of drives for their cloud servers, and they periodically release statistics on which brands and models have proven most and least reliable. When you need a hard drive, it pays to buy the brands and models they have found most reliable.
Over the past several years, we have found Seagate drives to be more failure-prone overall in our own computer consulting practice…and that’s pretty well confirmed in the BackBlaze findings. For that reasons we neither use or recommend them.
We tend to use and recommend Western Digital drives…which are marketed under the brands WD, WDC, and HGST.
Here are the statistics from BackBlaze, and we thank them for releasing them!
BackBlaze’s experience with drive reliability by brand & model.