Seagate slapped with class action lawsuit over hard drive failure rate

We have stopped using Seagate drives at work since we lost several drives in our server cluster and various desktops. The Seagate replacements for those also failed in a short time. We use WD exclusively now.

You can't dispute the statistics I suppose. I have 4 Seagate 1TB internals in 3 PCs. One has 14,000 power on hours and I haven't had any problems yet (touch wood). I have moved to WD because of the bad Seagate reputation. I can't easily acquire Hitachi drives...but WD now own the Hitachi HDD business so are WD and Hitachi drives still different?

Count me as another who's had issues with Seagate drives. Mine were older and only 500GB apiece but they both failed within a month of each other. I will never buy another one from them. WD and Toshiba are the only HDD's I buy anymore, external of course.

The high failure rate was only for the 3TB models. I own a mix of 1.5, 2 and 5TB Seagate drives and haven't had any issues with them. I haven't found them to be any less or any more reliable than the WD drives I have.

My first hdd was a Seagate. A 20MB ST-225. Cost me $500 in 1985.

BlueGuy said:

HelloItsMeAgain said:

Oddly, I have two external Seagates purchased back in 2006 and they still work.

Brds7t7 said:

The older drives seem more reliable than the newer ones.

Yeah, Seagate got me through all my Atari ST years where WDs were the failures, but times seemed to have changed that, I have a 2TB Green [and I was loving the Greens] that CrystalDiskInfo started reporting as having issues and by the time I got Roadkil's Unstoppable Copier on it [to transfer to a 4TB WD that was on sale at a local brick & mortar] it was too late. I lost some TV show files, but that is all it was used for, so I'm slowly rebuilding from file sharing and torrents but it is a slow process because of the monthly data cap of 175GB.
I have one other for movie storage but it has a very low power-on hour count, less than 8000, the one that failed though had less than 30000 hours but the Seagate 2TB Green in the home built PVR has just under 17500 hours and is used for storage of the MPEG2 transport streams from Over-The-Air broadcasts and is the same chronological age as the other two, finally the Maxtor 300GiB has over 46000 hours and is used for time shift effects like pause & rewind and prior to 2012 was used for storage of recordings and is approaching ten years chronological, as it was used in a previous PVR build.

The workstation "work" or "job" drive is a 1TB 2.5" ST1000LM014-1EJ164 hybrid Seagate [17620 Hrs]and is just as fast as an SSD for most work, runs coolest @ 87F, heat still seems to be the traditional enemy as both the old Seagate television drive (2TB) and the 4TB WD reports running at 95F within CrystalDiskInfo application.

My best sources, when trying to decide what to buy, come from user reviews, similar to yours, other customers @ the brick&mortar, and seeing what comes to the data recovery tech's desk but at least at the B&M I can get a quick exchange, if the bloody things go while still under warranty, the three Greens are far past that.

All in all these days, it does seem like a crap shoot.

Brds7t7 said:

The main problem with the Green drives is the power saving/intellipark feature. It's way too aggressive and basically kills the drives early. The heads Park every 8 seconds. If you use wdidle3 to set the hard parking to 300 seconds (5 minutes) the drives will last a lot longer.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php...le3-exe.18171/

The green drives are actually being phased out now anyway and replaced with new blue drives up to 6TB storage.

WD stirs green and blue into pot, comes out with Blue HDDs ? The Register

Only the earliest WD Greens had the excessive head parking issue. Even though that was fixed a long time ago, the WD Greens still "enjoy" the bad reputation they got back then. They (and the new 5400rpm Blues, which are essentially the same as the Greens), still park the heads after 8 seconds but, once parked, they stay parked until the drive is accessed again. That is one of the reasons why the WD Greens are best used strictly for data storage and aren't suitable for use as an OS drive.

I find the head parking feature to be especially beneficial for my backup drives, which are all WD Greens. By giving them a few seconds to spin down and park the heads before removing them from the hotswap bay, I reduce the likelihood of damaging the platters with the heads when moving the drives.

Mayhap the same weasels lawyers doing this suit will do the same against M$py to get them to stop ramming Win 10 and their spyware down our throats.