The Seagate drives' performance is still notable, however, because those HDDs have been in use for 74 months on average with a lifetime failure rate of 0.92 percent. The WD and HGST drives have been in use for three and 21 months, respectively, so their 0 (WD) and 0.41 percent (HGST) failure rates could rise as they continue to age.

But overall, it does seem like Hitachi and Seagate are the most unreliable manufacturers of them all. If you have a hard drive from any of these six manufacturers, the average life expectancy is just under three years if your drive has a propensity for failure.

Seagate is no longer using the industry standard " M ean T ime B etween F ailures" (MTBF) to quantify disk drive average failure rates. MTBF has proven useful in the past, but it is flawed. To address issues of reliability, Seagate is changing to another standard: " A nnualized F ailure R ate" (AFR).

According to Backblaze, this drive was failing at a higher than expected rate, and units are currently undergoing analysis and firmware upgrades that helped see failure rates drop slightly in between Q3 2021 (6.29%) and Q4 2021 (4.66%).

So, it seems like a non-insignificant number of these drivers have been failing the past few months. Seems like the life on these isn't even 3 years. There's been a huge swing of negative ratings on amazon recently due to this. And multiple people on this forum have had them fail in the past few weeks (mine failed last week).