It’s important to back up your computer files from time to time, but you shouldn’t rely solely on cloud storage. If the internet goes down – or worse, the storage company goes bankrupt – you’ll lose your data. On the other hand, you will lose your saves if your external drive fails, and brand popularity is no protection against such events. Researchers from the University of Essex and Sungkyunkwan University have published a study on IEEE based hard drive reliability.
The data, which used work previously collected by Backblaze, looked at devices from four popular manufacturers: Seagate, Toshiba, Western Digital (WD), and HGST (which was purchased by WD). According to the study results, Seagate hard drives failed almost twice as often as WD and HGST drives, while Toshiba came in dead last, failing twice as often as Seagate drives. HGST was found to be slightly more reliable than WD, but not by much.
The research used 443,156 records examined by Backblaze between 2013 and 2025, resulting in 1.66 million record years of data. According to the data, Toshiba drives experienced a catastrophic increase in failure rate around the 60-month mark, typically dying twice as often as other brands. On the other side of the spectrum, most Seagate drive failures occurred within three years of first use; All Seagate hard drives that have passed this stage have been found to be generally reliable.
Too much heat causes a disc to age prematurely
It’s common knowledge that computers slow down as they age due to wear and tear on their hard drives. However, general usage is not the only culprit for hard drive failure; your work environment also plays a role. Backblaze’s study and data also show that hot drives generally fail faster. An increase of one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) increases the chance of failure by 2.1%, and these numbers get worse: the hotter the drive gets, the more likely it is to fail.
Yet another reason to keep your computer and workspace cool. To make matters worse, the same data shows that large drives fail faster than small ones, although this may be more due to the construction required to fill the drives with helium (this allows manufacturers to fill the drives with more platters for additional storage space). To be fair, the information used in the study is somewhat incomplete, so the numbers provided might not be completely accurate.
About a third of the drives listed in the data have been replaced with higher capacity versions. It’s possible that some drive brands are more reliable than the data suggests, as many weren’t allowed to fail in the experiment, but hard drive size, temperatures, and their impact on failure rates were downright universal among all models.
