“Large number of Seagate and WD 3TB drives are defective”

Backblaze, a cloud storage provider that collects statistics on hard drive reliability, reports that a significant number of Seagate and Western Digital 3TB desktop drives are failing. Hitachi drives would stop functioning much less often.

According to figures from Backblaze, the 3TB version of the Seagate Barracuda 7200.14, with model number ST3000DM001, has a failure rate of 15.7 percent. 3846 disks were examined. It is striking that Seagate’s 3TB Barracuda XT drives score reasonably well with a failure rate of 6.7 percent. This pattern can also be found with Seagate’s 1.5TB drives, according to Backblaze, where the Barracuda 7200.11 is a problem child, but the Barracuda LP does score well.

The 3TB Western Digital Red with type number WDC WD30EFRX also scores below average with a failure rate of 8.8 percent. Disks from Hitachi show the lowest failure rates on average in the tables of the cloud storage service, a statistic the company also published at the beginning of this year. Also, 4TB hard drives from Seagate and Hitachi do significantly better than the 3TB versions.

Backblaze does not give a precise reason why the 3TB drives from WD and Seagate fail relatively quickly. These consumer drives may not be able to withstand placement in a data center or it may go wrong when removing a drive from an external USB enclosure, the company speculates.

Backblaze further reports that purchasing more expensive enterprise drives is not a solution because these drives cost too much. Also, the failure rate would be comparable to that of consumer drives.