What Can 49,056 Hard Drives Tell Us? Hard Drive Reliability Stats for Q3 2015

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q3-2015/

I did not expect WD to have the highest failure rate and HGST the lowest, or am i reading this wrong.

John.

 

I think Seagate 1.5TB drives show as the worst in that table by wide margin, I'm not even sure how is it possible to have 130% failure rate? If they all failed it would be 100% failure rate, so to get 130%, some drives would have to fail, be replaced and replacement failed as well, but then average age should be less than a year? I'm confused, but I'm not surprised Hitachi seems the best.

 

The high failure rate from WD drives is concerning, especially their Red drives...

 

IIRC Hitachi/HGST has shown the lowest failure rate of both consumer and industrial drives for quite a while. WD's story is more complicated.

 

I picked a gaming notebook for my nephew for Christmas, two days later the WD 1TB died, all it does it click, click, click, nice going WD

John.

 

It looks like WD owns HGST.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST

John.

 

They do, but at least for now the products sold under the two brands are still different, which means the manufacturing capabilities of IBM/Hitachi is still alive.

Maybe a few years later HGST would become nothing but a brand. The lowest denominator always win.

 

It doesn't particularly surprise me that Toshiba and Hitachi drives have low failure rates; that matches their reports from previous years. I'm a little surprised that WD's is higher than Seagate now, but that seems to be as much about Seagate improving as anything.

As I recall, when WD bought Hitatchi, one of the governments that had to give approval required them to divest themselves of Hitachi's desktop drives division, in the name of competition, since only WD and Seagate would have been making desktop drives after the merger. So, WD sold Hitachi's desktop drive line to Toshiba (which previously was only making laptop hard drives).

You can read more about the requirements here on europa.eu.

What I'm not entirely clear on is how much of HGST's desktop assets were sold to Toshiba. All the Toshiba desktop drives, AFAIK, are from Hitachi lineage, but it looks like WD kept at least part of Hitachi's desktop business and/or its research for future development as well, with the more recent Hitachi-branded drives on the market.