Seagate slapped with class action lawsuit over hard drive failure rate

[Borg 386]

Seagate slapped with a class action lawsuit over hard drive failure rates

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.”

Seagate slapped with a class action lawsuit over hard drive failure rates | PCWorld

 

[Indianatone]

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

 

[Brds7t7]

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.

 

[whs]

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.

 

[lehnerus2000]

My friend lost 3 Seagate HDDs in ~2 years.
Ironically, the Seagate HDD he bought for me (320 GB) was still working last time a I 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.).

 

[ThrashZone]

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

 

[Brds7t7]

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.

 

[Sky Ranch]

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

 

[Brds7t7]

The older drives seem more reliable than the newer ones.

 

[Borg 386]

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.

 

[Mellon Head]

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.

 

[mjf]

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?

 

[indianacarnie]

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.

 

[RoasterMen]

My 320GB Hitachi is doing great!

 

[chefduane]

I've had a 1Tb external Hitachi Touro for a few years now (4-5 maybe) for backups. Rock solid, no problems.

 

[BlueGuy]

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

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]

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?threads/hacking-wd-greens-and-reds-with-wdidle3-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

 

[strollin]

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.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

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

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.

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?threads/hacking-wd-greens-and-reds-with-wdidle3-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.

 

[Brds7t7]

How did they fix the issue on newer drives? 8 seconds is still 8 seconds after all. You'll still get an excessively high load cycle count compared to a "normal" drive, unless the drive is hardly ever in use. Didn't the older drives stay parked until you accessed them anyway?
The freenas forum still has reports of excessively high counts even on the more recently manufactured greens. Or did they make them more reliable somehow?
Can't say I've ever actually used any Greens though as the intellipark feature never appealed to me. I've always stuck to Blues and Blacks. Usually the Blues are my go to drive though as they're a decent performing drive for the price.
Pity they won't make the larger storage Blues (2 - 6TB) run at 7,200 rpm. Larger & faster Blues would be a welcome addition.
Agree that 5,400 just isn't good enough for an OS drive.