Seagate 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.”