Seagate Faces Class Action Lawsuit Over Failing Hard Drives

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If you bought one of Seagate’s Barracuda 3TB hard drives or Backup Plus 3TB external drives, you may be entitled to reimbursement . Here's a quote from the law firm handling the case.

These particular hard drives were marketed as innovative, fast, powerful, reliable, dependable, and having extremely low failure rates, when in reality, the failure rate of the drives was substantially higher than advertised. Consumers report them failing as an unprecedented rate – sometimes even days after their first use.

According to the firms' investigation, Seagate promised purchasers that it would replace the failed hard drives, but replacements were also defective, and failed at extremely high rates, leaving Seagate’s warranty promise unfulfilled, and consumers without working hard drives.
 
I had every single Seagate 250GB enterprise sata drive in a 5 drive raid die over the years. But I'm sure the award would be a new or even refurbished seagate drive.
 
People still think class action suits work?

Resolution will be as usual, each individual will get $3 and a pack of chewing gum, and the lawyers will get $50 million.
 
just the 3TB? what about the 2TB that where just as bad
 
it's probably bad firmware... I remember a few years ago they were having problems with 1TB drives with firmware 7200.12 They sent me a replacement drive with the same firmware it died as well. The third drive was 7200.11 worked just fine. So who knows. it's 2016 one would think the HDD would be perfected by now.
 
Ducman69 said:
People still think class action suits work?

Resolution will be as usual, each individual will get $3 and a pack of chewing gum, and the lawyers will get $50 million.
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Exactly, they work fine.....just not for the consumer..:)
 
I have had so many of these drives fail. Unfortunately I tossed all but one. I've had 5 of them fail.
 
acidrain97 said:
it's probably bad firmware... I remember a few years ago they were having problems with 1TB drives with firmware 7200.12 They sent me a replacement drive with the same firmware it died as well. The third drive was 7200.11 worked just fine. So who knows. it's 2016 one would think the HDD would be perfected by now.
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It is 2016, and the HDD is perfected: By HGST and WD. Not by Seagate. Avoid Seagate drives.
 
KazeoHin said:
It is 2016, and the HDD is perfected: By HGST and WD. Not by Seagate. Avoid Seagate drives.
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Nah. I'm guessing Seagate does have problems but I've been buying them for years and haven't had any issues. Only drives that have died on me are WDs. We are all pretty anecdotal though.
 
anthrex said:
Nah. I'm guessing Seagate does have problems but I've been buying them for years and haven't had any issues. Only drives that have died on me are WDs. We are all pretty anecdotal though.
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Anecdotal stuff is not dependable. Seagate, however, has YEARS of HARD DATA that gives irrefutable evidence that their failure rates are double their competition at lowest.

Just Google 'Seagate Failure Rate' and enjoy the ride.
 
acidrain97 said:
it's probably bad firmware... I remember a few years ago they were having problems with 1TB drives with firmware 7200.12 They sent me a replacement drive with the same firmware it died as well. The third drive was 7200.11 worked just fine. So who knows. it's 2016 one would think the HDD would be perfected by now.
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I remember reading on a Russian site that it was a design flaw, something about a seal on the data connector letting in dust if I remember correctly.
 
Im not backblaze or anything, but in the last ~ 7-8 years of all the HD's I have worked with (about 200 maybe?) The only ones I have seen fail are Seagates. They fail all the time in various RAID 10's (was not my decision to use Seagates)
 
hardware_failure said:
Im not backblaze or anything, but in the last ~ 7-8 years of all the HD's I have worked with (about 200 maybe?) The only ones I have seen fail are Seagates. They fail all the time in various RAID 10's (was not my decision to use Seagates)
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Similar experience here. I've seen all kinds of HDD die on me, but seagates are heavily ahead of the pack in faulty drive numbers.
 
dangerouseddy said:
I remember reading on a Russian site that it was a design flaw, something about a seal on the data connector letting in dust if I remember correctly.
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This may have been a problem with some drives letting contaminants in, but I can absolutely confirm that it is not the issue with all of them. I've opened several 3tb Seagates that failed and they were all spotless inside. I have seen the Russian site / video showing someone opening a drive and finding it filthy. I'm not sure how or why their drive got that way, but I'd tell anyone opening a dead Seagate to not expect seeing the same thing.

I also do not believe the problem is caused by firmware. Seagate did have a firmware problem, but that was with older drives with smaller capacities. Those drives would disappear one day, completely and without warning. These 3tb Seagates do not die that way. Usually you start getting read errors, followed by sectors being marked bad and moved. When that happens there are days remaining (or less) before total failure. Then you get the clicking, or system hangs / won't boot when the drive is plugged in. I don't know exactly what the cause of the failure is, but it has something to do with the way data is stored on the platters degrading or read heads wearing. Something along those lines.
 
Seagate has always been the Chrysler, Jaguar, Land Rover of the HDD world and makes me wonder why people still buy them. Way too many people I know have had problems which is why I have always avoided them like the plague.
 
amdgamer said:
Seagate has always been the Chrysler, Jaguar, Land Rover of the HDD world and makes me wonder why people still buy them. Way too many people I know have had problems which is why I have always avoided them like the plague.
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Because unlike those brands, Seagate is cheap.

I've spoken with spare-parts planners and IT coordinators for big projects and I say

"You know Seagate products have a comically high failure rate"

"Yep"

"You know thats going to give us problems later"

"Yep"

"Then why are you buying them?"

"Cheap"


You see, in big organisations, each department is given a specific budget or target, so if a spare-parts department orders drives that are $5 cheaper per unit, they end up saving millions in a year and looking great. Meanwhile the service department ends up wasting ten times that amount sending out hourly-paid technicians to replace the drives that fail. Service department looks bad, Spare parts department looks good. The company as a whole suffers, but nobody REALLY looks into it far enough to notice.

That's why Seagate drives are still around, and Seagate as a company has NO intentions of improving its QC.
 
Had a Seagate Barricude 3 TB die on me a couple of months ago. The dreaded clicking sound and losing the drive in file manager. One of the reasons I finally bought a Synology with several WD Red Pros.
 
I've got 2 or 3 4TB seagates and they work without a hitch, but those 3TB models had a bad reputation. As I recall, the reason I got the 4TB seagates is because WD was having problems with theirs at that point.
 
My 3TB internal seagate is fine so far just after a year. It is loud though.
 
About 1/3 fail for me in the first month with seagate. I wont even buy them anymore personally. I hope the execs have to be flogged in a public space for every bit of data loss.
 
KarsusTG said:
About 1/3 fail for me in the first month with seagate. I wont even buy them anymore personally. I hope the execs have to be flogged in a public space for every bit of data loss.
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At this point, the writing is on the wall: Enough educated people know that Seagate is rubbish. The only arguments otherwise are "I personally have not had a problem". Meanwhile class action lawsuits and real-world data are showing that they are indeed worthless. Essentially, there is no excuse for anyone who calls themselves IT or Hardware enthusiasts purchasing a Seagate product and then bitching about quality.
 
Ironically, the 2 3TB drives in my sig on my main rig are Seagates.. No problems yet (one is > 3 years old, the other 1 year), but I guess I am lucky so far.
 
I have piles of dead 1TB 7200.11 and 7200.12 drives... all the 1.5TB seagates died so many times we just pulled them all out of service and sold off the working ones on ebay

meanwhile I populated my arrays with hitachi drives and (knock on wood) no failures yet!
 
swetmore said:
Ironically, the 2 3TB drives in my sig on my main rig are Seagates.. No problems yet (one is > 3 years old, the other 1 year), but I guess I am lucky so far.
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MY theory on seagate is that their issue is not design, but QC. Essentially, too many bad apples get pushed out and not enough resources devoted to filtering out products that are faulty out the gate. So if you have a handful of drives that have survived 1 year, chances are they will be fine, as they probably would pass a rigorous QC.
 
KazeoHin said:
MY theory on seagate is that their issue is not design, but QC. Essentially, too many bad apples get pushed out and not enough resources devoted to filtering out products that are faulty out the gate. So if you have a handful of drives that have survived 1 year, chances are they will be fine, as they probably would pass a rigorous QC.
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This is mostly true, seagate is a popular bulk supplier of HDDs they also give the best bulk discount. If they had kept drives back they probably couldn't keep up with these bulk orders.
 
I think the only Seagate I had was a Barracuda ATA IV that had "Fluid Dynamic Bearings" and foam padding to reduce noise. It died after a few years. Can't say I've had perfect luck with other brands, but I didn't give Seagate another chance after that.
 
Most the drives Dell shipped with the servers we bought over the past few years where Seagate drives. When they fail out of warranty (and they fail way too often) I replace then with non-Dell drives, so I can avoid the Seagate.

Had another drive fail last month and was shocked when I found out it was a WD. First WD server drive I had fail in years.
 
I stopped buying Seagate around the 7200.12 fiasco. I had most of those fail. Haven't touched them since. Samsung, HGST, Toshiba and WD have all been fine though I definitely prefer WD and HGST.
 
Funny I bought 2 3TB drives recently for adding to my backup pool. I know it's a bad choice to use Seagate but since they're not "live" drives I don't care as much if they fail as it's just one of many backup copies. But that said I might be entitled, I'll have to check into this further. Class action lawsuits are hilarious for the amount of money you get, but meh, why not. If I can get myself a free coffee and donut, may as well go for it! :D
 
nutzo said:
Most the drives Dell shipped with the servers we bought over the past few years where Seagate drives. When they fail out of warranty (and they fail way too often) I replace then with non-Dell drives, so I can avoid the Seagate.

Had another drive fail last month and was shocked when I found out it was a WD. First WD server drive I had fail in years.
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I think seagate is the biggest bul drive OEM supplier, so this doesn't surprise me.
 
I had something like 3 or 4 of those 1.5TB ones and every single one...every last one...failed within a year. Like what the fuck? Where's my settlement?
 
I've had 12x 3TB 7200 RPM Seagate drives (ST3000DM001) for over a year, no issues. All three of the 3TB Western Digital Green drives I bought were DOA. Sometimes you're just unlucky.
 
I'm moving away from Seagate. I felt they were the most reliable drives in the pre-TB hdd era. I continue feeling this way up until we got to the 2 TB. I think that was when Seagate put out one model of drive that had a firmware issue. From there, seems to be just going downhill.

I was exclusively buying Seagate hdds, I just picked up an HGST to replace my failed 4 TB Seagate. I'll probably get some more and some WDs. I'm sure the Seagates will start dropping off one after the other. This has been my second Seagate to fail in the last year. Although, they have lasted 3 years.

I'm hoping 3 year life span isn't the normal nowadays for HDDs.
 
am sitting here looking at a dead Barracuda 7200.11, 1500 GBytes

my 3TB Seagate Expansion still runs fine
 
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