Economists Christoph Siemroth of the University of Essex and Yeomyung Park of Sungkyunkwan University have published a peer-reviewed IEEE study that re-crunches 12 years of Backblaze's public drive data, covering 443,156 hard drives and more than 1.66 million drive-years from 2013 through Q2 2025, and finds that HGST drives fail at roughly 41% of Seagate's rate when drives of matched age, capacity, form factor, and operating temperature are compared. WD comes in at about 52% of Seagate's failure rate, while Toshiba sits in last at 107%. As for the most reliable brand in the ranking? HGST, one you can't buy new after WD acquired it in 2012 and wound it down.
Go deeper with TH Premium: AI and data centers
