Seagate sued over unreliable Barracuda, Backup Plus 3TB hard drives

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http://www.macnn.com/articles/16/02...aw.firm.seeks.information.from.owners.132264/

Consumers today filed a national class-action lawsuit against Seagate Technologies, claiming the data storage company sold hard drives that routinely failed at exceptionally high rates, leaving consumers with broken hardware and significant loss of data, according to Hagens Berman, the law firm attached to the suit. The lawsuit, filed today in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, states that Seagate's hard drives failed to live up to the advertised promises, violated federal consumer laws, as well as Seagate's own warranties after delivering faulty replacement hard drives.
 
FTFY
Lawyers = $5,000,000+
Class = coupon for a refurbished seagate hard drive at 30% off. (You can choose only from the models that were refurbished from the recalled class to apply the discount)
 
All of the 3tb seagates I bought died around the 1 year mark. I doubt I'll get anything out of this because they'll probably require a receipt which I don't have any more. If I'm lucky they'll take the serial number and I'll get $0.45 for each drive.
 
I'm pretty sure some Seagate drives had a higher than 100% failure rate

Lets just take a step back and let that soak in.

That means drives are dying so frequently within the warranty period, that the replacement drives shipped out are then failing again within the warranty period... And this is happening enough to legitimately tip the failure rate over 100%.

I also work in open warranty case management for a major OEM here in Australia, and we have had a LOT of issues with Seagate. Before this job I worked as a builder/designer for a chain of stores, and there was a particular brand of Seagate 500gb drive that lost us a LOT of customers due to the high rate of failure. Its not an anecdote, a Google search will unveil the real data: Seriously AVOID SEAGATE PRODUCTS.
 
It'll be fine so long as you never turn it on, apparently.

Lol!

Way back when these drives were the cheapest component in your pc I had 5 of them. The last one lasted until 6-9 months. I still have their replacements in my closest.
 
I'm pretty sure some Seagate drives had a higher than 100% failure rate

Lets just take a step back and let that soak in.

That means drives are dying so frequently within the warranty period, that the replacement drives shipped out are then failing again within the warranty period... And this is happening enough to legitimately tip the failure rate over 100%.

I also work in open warranty case management for a major OEM here in Australia, and we have had a LOT of issues with Seagate. Before this job I worked as a builder/designer for a chain of stores, and there was a particular brand of Seagate 500gb drive that lost us a LOT of customers due to the high rate of failure. Its not an anecdote, a Google search will unveil the real data: Seriously AVOID SEAGATE PRODUCTS.

Are you referring to the clicking drives? I think mine were the 640gb variant and I had to move my pc out of my room due to that annoying (and ultimately dying) click.
 
LOL...The only drives that have failed me were Seagates. I stopped buying them years ago.

Agree that class action is good in as much as it reduces Seagate profit, but it only puts that money in the lawyers' pockets. The folks who lost data are not gonna see a dime.
 
My Datacenter uses a lot of Seagate drives. Not many drive deaths, we also carry WD before any one gets upset lol.
 
The problem was only with 3 tb seagate. I have 20 of them, lost about 10 by the 3 year mark. Terrible drives
 
It'll be fine so long as you never turn it on, apparently.

Hahaha, I have an NIB seagate Expansion 3TB from a couple of years ago. Was planning to shuck it now and see if it holds up to various torture tests, or maybe just get rid of it on eBay.
 
I've seen similar failure rates among all brands, and I have lots of 3TB seagate drives, but 3TB WD Greens failed just as much.
 
I've been seeing high failure rates with the 2TB drives, too. The infamous 7200.11 line with the botched firmware updates. Seems Seagate pretty much went steadily downhill once they bought out Maxtor. (Something a lot of us predicted on the forums.)
 
The infamous 7200.11 line with the botched firmware updates.

I had quite a few RMAs on 7200.11s at work however not a single one with the firmware bug. Although with the rate of failure (> 10% per year) not sure if I can call myself lucky.
 
I have a couple of old Seagate 250GB drives that I bought in 2008 for a RAID-0 and they are still
running strong split up into different machines now.

Replaced them with a Seagate 512GB SSD that's been running fine for a couple of years.

Seems to me all of the manufacturers have had some trouble with the large 1TB and up drives.

It makes sense though since the higher data densities are more error prone. Small surface
defects take out more data than lower density drives.
 
In all the computers that I've worked on, 9/10 of drives that have failed or are in the process of failing are Seagate drives. The other 10% are mostly WD Green drives. I'm talking about hundreds of drives. This isn't just a coincidence. I do everything I can to avoid Seagate these days yet I still have piles of dead Seagate drives on my workbench. Only saving grace is that when they fail, they usually fail "slowly" to the extent that you can usually still recover some data from the drive. Some, after a clean format, are even potentially useful as junk storage. Nothing important of course, but great for old porn.
 
We had a SAN that had about 32 Seagate 1TB drives that have just about all failed. Apparently they had a "bad" batch but would only replace them when they failed. Took about 3 years but they did. We've moved away from Seagate.
 
My Datacenter uses a lot of Seagate drives. Not many drive deaths, we also carry WD before any one gets upset lol.

Their enterprise class drives seem OK. Their consumer grade drives are another story.
 
I had 4 of the ****ers in RAID 5 and 2 of them died in such rapid succession that I lost my data. Thankfully 80% of it was backed up, but that's still a lot of lost data. I joined the lawsuit.
 
Their enterprise class drives seem OK. Their consumer grade drives are another story.

Their 6TB enterprise (SATA) drives are relatively cheap (for enterprise) and are working well for me so far -- not much more expensive than the HGST NAS drives and better claimed reliability with longer warranty.
 
The other 10% are mostly WD Green drives.

My experiences with reliability on the 750GB and 1.5TB WD Greens were terrible. Never again -- rather a Seagate 5900 than a WD Green (or as deceptively rebranded recently, the "WD Blue").
 
Far be it from me to defend Seagate...... But....... The VAST majority of the 3TB drives that have been dropping like flies at Backblaze are drives that were purchased soon after the flood. They sent employees out across the country (literally) and offered cash to customers for every external drive they could get their hands on. They then ripped the drives out of the USB cases and plugged them in to SATA ports. Seagate external drives, especially the Backup and Goflex series are binned drives that were unsuitable for either the usage patterns or duty cycle with which they were utilized. The Barracuda series drives (see comparison chart here) utilized by these externals are low duty cycle specced for only 8x5 (not 24x7) and the externals were generally binned versions that were low-priced externals because they couldn't meet even the diminished specs of the regular internals (another reason they only had a 1 year warranty instead of the standard 2/3). That being said, Of the hundreds of drives I have ordered over the past year for myself and for work, NONE have been Seagates!
 
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what is the warranty in the uk on seagate drives 2 years or 1?

also, why are the 2tb drives great compared to the 3tb?
 
what is the warranty in the uk on seagate drives 2 years or 1?

It's the same in the US for internal desktop/external drives. You get better warranties for their Enterprise drives.

also, why are the 2tb drives great compared to the 3tb?

Probably because they were, in general, more mature technology. The 4TB Seagate drives have also been decent, while the 5TBs have been flakier.
 
I'm pretty sure some Seagate drives had a higher than 100% failure rate

Seagate has gotten far tougher in warranty than before when they made average drives. The replacement drives are often sub par rejects and have a 30 or 90 day warranty. I got a drive back that developed faults in under 20 hours and it has 100 hours now as I use it only as a backup. It is also getting risky to buy drives on line as many are pulls or OEM and such and Seagate don't warrant them either. Although some people have said they got better drives as replacements, I have noticed I have always got pretty old drives back even when I sent back drives with less than 100 hours on them. I have never used a replacement as a main drive from them ever.. You can clearly see the drives have been abused for a few years and are untrustworthy. Which all shows there are a LOT of returns since drives I get form others have always been brand new and not just refurbished ones. Reformatting and clearing the smart dont fix the drive problems. It only masks out the problems the drive had experienced and they know it too which is why they have such short warranties. This is like those people who pour sand into the oil for leaky car engines to sell them so it runs fine for a few months before crashing.
 
what is the warranty in the uk on seagate drives 2 years or 1?

also, why are the 2tb drives great compared to the 3tb?

This has to do with them using damaged platters which had water damage. The drives should have been the same as they all use the very same electronics, platters and heads.. I dont believe some of the articles where they say it was leaks and dust and stuff.. If so that would have made all their drives similar.. They made those 2 TB drives for ever and milked it as a cash cow and are still using it for all the drives upto 5TB. Yet the 4TB drives now have better reliability showing they ran out of those old damaged platters and now have no problems. Also "SOME" drives uses special software which are Limited which causes problems. You might not have noticed those problems on regular drives but the limitations cause excess wear and tear on the drives and dont work well in many situations.

Also all of them had problems with 3TB, so I am guessing the manufacturer of the platters also damaged a lot of their inventory. As most of the components are again made by 3rd party.
 
ya we have had a pretty high failure rate of seagate 7200.11 and 7200.12 drives... but nothing beats our WD Raptor failure rate... we were RMA'ing so many Raptors to WD via Dell that WD and Dell flew down a team to find out why... they brought this fancy SATA protocol analyzer and put it between the mobo and the HD and left it running overnight... as luck would have it the next day the drive in that workstation had failed (dumb luck I guess)

didn't hear back for about a month and then got a delivery truck 10 pallets of WD Velociraptors sent all the Raptors back and had a much easier life
 
ya we have had a pretty high failure rate of seagate 7200.11 and 7200.12 drives... but nothing beats our WD Raptor failure rate... we were RMA'ing so many Raptors to WD via Dell that WD and Dell flew down a team to find out why... they brought this fancy SATA protocol analyzer and put it between the mobo and the HD and left it running overnight... as luck would have it the next day the drive in that workstation had failed (dumb luck I guess)

didn't hear back for about a month and then got a delivery truck 10 pallets of WD Velociraptors sent all the Raptors back and had a much easier life

wow....
 
Seagate and maxtor drives make me cringe. I knew a company that legitimately considered a copy of important data on a single external drive a "backup". The external drive in question? A LaCie Big Disk with two 500gb drives in a striped array for 1tb total storage... Guess how that turned out?
 
Seagate and maxtor drives make me cringe. I knew a company that legitimately considered a copy of important data on a single external drive a "backup". The external drive in question? A LaCie Big Disk with two 500gb drives in a striped array for 1tb total storage... Guess how that turned out?
like this :D
vegeta-dragon-ball-z-o.gif
 
I use to buy Maxtors and Seagates. I believe most of them died. The last drive I remember died was Western Digital raptor 36gb. It was the only WD that actually died. I have all Western Digital drives now and Corsair SSD. Love them :)
 
i think i had 8 or so of these backup plus drives that i took out from the enclosures and ran inside my synology nas, i think 5 of them failed on me. They only came with 1 year warrantys to begin with. and voided once removed from the enclosure. i have a nice stack of dead barrucudas..
 
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