Seagate slapped with a class action lawsuit over hard drive failure rates
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.”
I don't know about 3 TB drives but I have binned 4 2TB drives over the last few years. Another 2 have failing health. I now buy exclusively WD and monitor them with HD Sentimental. If you use Seagate you should do the same.
Hard Disk Sentinel - HDD health and temperature monitoring
I only buy WD or Hitachi now. I had two Seagate drives fail on me in the space of 4 months. Managed to get my money back but won't buy them again. Haven't had a WD drive fail on me once. I still have a couple WD blues from 2007 that I only use for VM's and both are still running perfectly.
The only drive that ever failed on me was a Seagate. But that is strange because I thought the Seagate and WD products come from the same shops in Thailand. Remember when they had a flood we could not get any and then the prices went way up.
My friend lost 3 Seagate HDDs in ~2 years.
Ironically, the Seagate HDD he bought for me (320 GB) was still working last timeaI tested it.
As a result of seeing his issues, I've always bought WD.
I've had a WD 2 TB HDD become unreliable (just after the warranty expired).
It's not dead, but its lost a bunch of sectors.
All of my other WD HDDs still work properly, including two that are older than the one that is unreliable (4 y.o. & 5 y.o.).
Last edited by lehnerus2000; 04 Feb 2016 at 19:08. Reason: Syntax
Yea I picked up 3 WD blacks only 2-750gb and 1-1tb just for system images
I have 3 smaller 300gb Hitachi's they seem bullet proof but win-10 did kill one of them :)
I've been really impressed with Hitachi drives. Very good performance and they have an extremely low failure rate.
Not sure what's happened to Seagate, but they've been getting progressively worse over the years. They used to make rock solid drives but I wouldn't recommend them anymore.
Oddly, I have two external Seagates purchased back in 2006 and they still work.
The older drives seem more reliable than the newer ones.
I have to wonder if during all that flooding they had, that shut down the factories, they didn't ditch the ones that took water damage, just refurbished them & passed them on as new. It would have taken a big chunk of their profits if they would have to throw away a lot of damaged drives.
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