Seagate slapped with a class action lawsuit over hard drive failure rates | PCWorldSeagate is facing a class action lawsuit over its 3TB consumer hard drives, which by some accounts have suffered unusually high failure rates.
The lawsuit, filed on February 1 in the U.S. District Court for Northern California, primarily cites reliability data from Backblaze, a cloud backup provider that builds its own storage pods from consumer hard drives. In Backblaze’s experience, Seagate's 3TB HDDs failed at much higher rates than other drives, prompting the storage provider to phase out those drives by mid-2015.
“In terms of raw percentages, approximately 32 percent of the [Seagate] Drives deployed in 2012 failed by early 2015,” the lawsuit says. “… Accordingly, only 68 percent of the Drives deployed in 2012 were operational after three years, which was well below Backblaze’s overall drive survival rate of 80 percent after four years.”
Not to bash the company, but back in the day when 7200 rpm was introduced, I had 2 Seagate drives constantly having read/write errors on 3 different systems. The last straw was a corrupted install on a pristine win 2000 pro disc. Backing the drive down to 5400 fixed the problem, but I have avoided them since when possible.
Wish I had known this was coming -- I had one of these very drives crash on me, only a few months after I bought it. Had I kept it, and the receipt, maybe after this lawsuit was settled, I to could get my $1.50 (while the lawyers, of course, each get several MILLION $ each!).
Useful tip: don't use consumer grade hard drives for enterprise grade work :)
Personal victim of Seagate 2 TB and 3 TB bad experience.
I bought 1 x 2TB and 3x 3TB Seagate HD (SD3000dm001) in 2012. All 3 TB drives failed near 2 years time frame or expired 2 years warranty.
Tried to swap parts, update firmware, data recovery, etc... without any success! Seagate unable to help because expired warranty. Thank God for my backup!
Replaced about 8 Seagate 1 TB hard drives (2.5" and 3.5" drives) for customers during the same period.
Moved to WD Black now with 5 years warranty at the end of 2014/early 2015. It is more expensive and so far there is no problem!
Lesson learned, you get what you paid! Your data is priceless.
I though I knew this was coming.
My Friends Seagate caught fire just a few weeks ago. I would've had burnt computer parts!
The problem with a class action lawsuit is only the lawyers come out a winner. I was included in a class action lawsuit over a $50.00 rebate for a disk drive. When the suite was settled instead of a $50.00 rebate I got a discount coupon for a new purchase from the same company that didn't honor the rebate. Guess where the coupon went. :)
Quote