14 and 16 TB HDDs of WD Had 0% Failure Rate this Q1 2022

The hard drive failure rates from Backblaze for this year’s first quarter are out. While the low capacity sector consisting of the major companies witnessed a meager failure rate, things got more interesting the moment 14, and 16TB HDDs came into the picture.

No 16 TB drive from WD crashed this quarter as a failure rate of 0% was noted through early 2022. Backblaze had a total of 3,800 16 TB drives powering Backblaze’s centers throughout Q1, with most of them up and running for two quarters. 

Last year, WD’s offerings were hailed to be the most reliable as the 14 and 16 TB drives witnessed a scanty failure rate of 0.43% and 0.14%, respectively. Therefore, it’s good to see the company carrying on the excellent work months later as well.

Now coming to Toshiba, its 16 TB offering came off worse due to an AFR of 1.15% for a clump of 5,974 drives. Given that the company had a decent last year where it managed to keep the annual failure rate below 1%, it was a bit surprising to see the giants regress.

14 and 16 TB HDDs from WD Are the Most Reliable in the Market — 16 TB HDDs from WD

However, the same cannot be said for Seagate, as the firm performed slightly well in the 16 TB segment by registering a failure rate of 0.80% for a total of 13,259 drives. It’s great that Seagate is taking forward steps after the blunder they faced in 2021, where an annualized failure rate of 1.11% was witnessed.

Talking about the 14 TB models now, Seagate and Toshiba delivered a mixed performance with the failure rates ranging from 0% to over 4%. As for Western Digital, a faultless result where no drives failed since their installation 15 months ago was noted.

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ABOUT WD

Headquartered in San Jose, California, Western Digital is one of the world’s largest hard disk drive manufacturing companies. Other services offered by WD include making and selling of data technology products like storage devices, data center systems, and cloud storage services.

Some of the competitors that Western Digital takes on are data management and storage companies like Seagate and Micron.