Today, consumers filed a national class-action lawsuit against the company, claiming Seagate was not only issuing faulty drives, but that the warranty appointed replacement hard drives were equally defective. 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.
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“Seagate promised purchasers reliable hard drives that would safeguard their important documents and cherished photos, but consumers report that these Seagate hard drives fail sometimes just days after their first use”, said Steve Berman, managing partner of Hagens Berman. That’s not to say Seagate isn’t at fault, but the case isn’t so cut-and-dry given the many variables that can factor into hard drive failure.
The complaint states that 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.
Some of the reported failures occurred just days after the customers first began storing data on the drives.
It specifically points the finger at Seagate’s 3TB hard drives: the Barracuda 3TB and the Backup Plus 3TB External. Anyone who has experienced a Seagate 3 TB drive failure is encouraged to contact Hagens Berman and join the class action suit. According to Brian Beach, a distinguished engineer at Backblaze, 3TB drives in general seem to suffer from worsened reliability. “However, even if there were no warranty, a 15 percent annual failure rate on the consumer “desktop” drive and a 0 percent failure rate on the “enterprise” drive, the breakeven would be 10 years, which is longer than we expect to even run the drives for”.
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On its own website, the Hagens Berman and Sheller law firm handling the suit is inviting consumers who purchased one of the drives in question to fill out forms to see if they, “may be entitled to damages including replacement costs and damages from loss of data and data recovery expenses”.
