Which HDDs have failed the most from WD, HGST, Seagate and Toshiba in 2022?

Hard drives are considered fairly reliable data storage systems and although as a general rule they tend to last for many years, it must be borne in mind that the failure rate depends a lot on the model. As we could see in the failure rates of Q2 2022, there were models that failed 5% and others that barely reached 1%. Now that we are in 2023, backblaze has updated these figures thus indicating the hard drive failure rates by 2022.

When Backblaze tested hard drives in August 2022, we could see that Seagate was one of the brands with the most failures. In fact, in the statistics of that news, we could see that the failure rate was led by the Seagate ST14000NM0138 of 14TB with a 5.64%. After this we had a Seagate ST12000NM007 of 12TB with a 5.01% and a Seagate ST4000DM000 of 4TB with a 3.42%. But of course, the figures were given per quarter, because if we went to the section with the highest failure rate in the entire useful life of the discs, the hgst of 8TB HUH728080ALE604 led with a 6.26%.

These are the hard drives that have failed the most throughout 2022

With the new Backblaze data on the tray, we will analyze which will be the hard drives with the most failures. Although first of all it should be noted that the company had 235,608 hard drives divided into 231,309 for data and 4,299 for boot, the latter being discarded. After making other cuts, in the end a total of 230,921 HDD throughout 2022. Of these we can summarize that the ones with the most failures in 2022 are:

• Seagate ST14000NM0138 14TB with a failure rate of 5.70%.
• HGST HUH728080ALE604 8TB with a failure rate of 5.27%.
• Seagate ST12000NM0007 12TB with a failure rate of 4.75%.

We can say that, once again, we have Seagate leading the failure rates, although it is also true that the hard drive that has had the fewest failures is also theirs. This would be the Seagate ST8000NM000A 8TBwith a rate of 0% missesalthough they only had 79 units at your service. Now, if we go to the annual figures, we see that the failure rate has increased significantly. From 2021 to 2022 lthe discs of 4TB fail a 0.9% morethose of 6TB a 0.57% morethose of 8TB a 0.77% and those of 10TB 1.47%. with hard drives more than 12TB we see that the increase is much smaller, with an average of one 0.20%.

Seagate continues to lead failure rate in 2022

If we now go to the figures for the entire useful life of these hard drives, we can see clear differences between models. Leading this we have the Seagate ST14000NM0138 with 5.21% failures. This model will ring a bell. since it appeared in the results of Q2 2022, although in that case it had a 5.7% failure rate. Regarding the second place, we have the Seagate ST4000DM000 of 4 TB that is left with a 2.54% failures instead of 3.42% of the previous results. Although in their defense, we are talking about the oldest hard drives in this table, with a mean age 85.9 monthsthat is, more than 7 years.

From there, we can see other brands such as Toshiba MG08ACA16TE with 16TB and a failure rate of 1.47%. Of this brand we also see the model MG07ACA14TA of 14 TB that is located with a 0.9% of failures. Instead, other brands like hgst either Western Digital maintain error rates of 0.5% or lessapparently being more reliable.