Seagate 3TB lawsuit

[ratdude747]

http://www.techspot.com/news/63672-s...tive-hard.html

Consumers aren't happy with the reliability of Seagate's hard drives, filing a class-action lawsuit against the company in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California alleging that their hard drives "failed to live up to the advertised promises."

The lawsuit specifically relates to Seagate's 3TB hard drive models: the Barracuda 3TB Hard Disk Drive, or the Backup Plus 3TB External Hard Disk Drive. Hagens Berman, the firm representing consumers against Seagate, claims that these drives "failed at exceptionally high rates, leaving consumers with broken hardware and significant loss of data."

The exceptionally high failure rates these drives exhibited were higher than advertised, according to the complaint, with some failures occurring "days after their first use". These claims are backed up by Backblaze, which have stated for several years that Seagate's Barracuda 3 TB drives were the least reliable in their collection of over 49,000 drives.
On top of that, the suit alleges that replacement drives sent to consumers after an original drive failure were also faulty and unreliable, violating consumer law and Seagate's drive warranties.

The lawsuit is hoping to deliver consumers compensation for replacement costs, loss of data, and data recovery expenses. Anyone who has experienced a Seagate 3 TB drive failure is encouraged to contact Hagens Berman and join the class action suit.

RD says: Glad I don't own one... not that said product appeals to me anyway. Raid 1/5/10 for the win!

[dmill89]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

http://www.techspot.com/news/63672-s...tive-hard.html



RD says: Glad I don't own one... not that said product appeals to me anyway. Raid 1/5/10 for the win!

Why does this not surprise me? The only HDDs I've ever had fail were Seagate or Maxtor (which Seagate now owns) and none of them were particularly old, it may just be "bad luck", but I will never buy another Seagate HDD.

[ratdude747]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

Why does this not surprise me? The only HDDs I've ever had fail were Seagate or Maxtor (which Seagate now owns) and none of them were particularly old, it may just be "bad luck", but I will never buy another Seagate HDD.

Funny, in terms of recent drives, I've had bad luck with WD Caviar Blues more than anything. I had 2 320GB's run OK for a year then suddenly die... one was a warranty replacement for the other. I still have the 2nd one, as I don't want to ride the merry-go-round again.

FWIW they were made back when the greens were greens (and not rebadged into blues like they are now).

[momaka]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

I've seen enough modern WDs and Seagates fail that I wouldn't trust any of them. Even my old Deskstar HDDs with bad sectors have lasted more than many of these. Thus, my important data goes on old PATA HDDs that have proven themselves over the years.
If I was to get a new HDD today, it would be Hitachi. Sure they are owned by WD, but I think they kept some of their technology, because they seem to do a lot better than the rest of the WD drives. At least according to the backblaze statistics last time I checked.

Raid 1/5/10 for the win!

I don't know about that :\ .
Loose the motherboard and there goes your RAID. Single HDDs, on the other hand, can be connected to any PC to back up your data. The best bet is to have one main HDD to keep your data on and several back-up HDDs - whether external or in different PCs and shared on a network is fine either way. It is a bit more messy and more work, of course.

[ratdude747]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

I don't know about that :\ .
Loose the motherboard and there goes your RAID. Single HDDs, on the other hand, can be connected to any PC to back up your data. The best bet is to have one main HDD to keep your data on and several back-up HDDs - whether external or in different PCs and shared on a network is fine either way. It is a bit more messy and more work, of course.

Aside from corruption resulting from the failure, all one needs is another system/card with a compatible controller. Intel fakeraid is pretty easy to find boards for... and in my case, I use 3ware/AMCC HW RAID cards, which are pretty much cross-compatible (I've used the same arrays on 9500, 9550, and 9650 cards and gotten them to read/write without trouble). Either way, the data is NOT lost, just not always as readily accessible depending on one's stash of spare hardware.

One drive: blow your drive, data go . You can plug the dead drive in another PC, but that won't help you

[diif]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

Hard drives die. All of them. Some last longer then others bit I've had a WD black die on its second day out of its wrapper.
Anyone who isn't backing up their important data should be.
RAID is not backup.

[Topcat]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

I've had exceptionally good luck with WD enterprise drives. had some in operation since 09, running 24/7/365....not even a bad sector....

[Uniballer]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

anyone who isn't backing up their important data should be. Raid is not backup.

+1

[ddscentral]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

While RAID (not 0) is not a backup, it's better than using a single HDD.

[diif]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

While RAID (not 0) is not a backup, it's better than using a single HDD.

Agreed, but still no substitute for not doing backups.

[goontron]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

I've had exceptionally good luck with WD enterprise drives. had some in operation since 09, running 24/7/365....not even a bad sector....

Wish i could say the same.... all my 250gb WD enterprise drives dropped sectors like flys!

[Topcat]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

Wish i could say the same.... all my 250gb WD enterprise drives dropped sectors like flys!

strange. I have 4x 250gb WD sata1's that were 11yrs old running constantly in that time. Cycled them out when they started making a little bearing noise. still no bad sectors. I gave them away, and as far as I know, they're still in use today. The drives I am referring to above are 1TB RE3's. Coming from the guy that thinks a quantum bigfoot is an awesome drive, I won't put too much stock into that...

[goontron]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

strange. I have 4x 250gb WD sata1's that were 11yrs old running constantly in that time. Cycled them out when they started making a little bearing noise. still no bad sectors. I gave them away, and as far as I know, they're still in use today. The drives I am referring to above are 1TB RE3's. Coming from the guy that thinks a quantum bigfoot is an awesome drive, I won't put too much stock into that...

Quantums are an awesome drive.... In theory. In production, not so much. But the TX series was the first double Gb drive. Then the TS series was the biggest drive capacity for a short stint.
BTW my WDs that dropped sectors was of the RE4 line.

[Compgeke]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

Quantum and Connor drives are the ones I can't stand. In ol Macs the Quantum Prodrive an Lightning models an all Connors seem to universally be pretty meh, providing they work. Quantums either have motors that die or the head rest (rubber piece) turns into goo. Connor drives have gaskets that turn into goo.

Also had a couple IDE Quantum Fireballs catch fire. Big IC on the bottom would randomly just start burning.

[eccerr0r]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

I've only one Maxtor die on me early on, but was running a RAID array with all maxtor/seagate drives, and it lasted over 7 years 24/7/365 and I decommissioned them due to the fact they were only 4x120GB disks (and were full). Currently running WD/Hitachi drives in my 4+1x500GB disks and they are pending upgrade to Toshiba ??x2TB disks. We'll see.

I really think most disks are about as reliable as each other, other than a couple of clunkers. One disk line does not necessarily indicate how good their other disks are...

[Mad_Professor]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

http://www.techspot.com/news/63672-s...tive-hard.html



RD says: Glad I don't own one... not that said product appeals to me anyway. Raid 1/5/10 for the win!

I have about 10 of these 3TB drives that are paper weights, I've already signed up, whatever the judgement is, hopefully they'll give me new drives or my money back.

PS:
Get off that RAID SHIT! GET ZFS!

[momaka]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

One drive: blow your drive, data go . You can plug the dead drive in another PC, but that won't help you

I didn't say use just one drive, period.
I said one drive with multiple backups is better than a RAID array (at least, IMO). Whether those backups are external USB or network drives (or even cloud storage?), is irrelevant. It's more upkeep, since you have to manually copy data across drives (unless you have some type of syncing software) vs. RAID 1/5/10, which makes a copy of your data on more than one drive right on-the-fly.

Still, I'd rather not mess with RAID - a bit unnecessarily complicated for me. As Junk Parts (RIP) used to say, the only RAID I use on my computers comes in a spray can.

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

yea, i stumbled upon news of this lawsuit accidentally while surfing through my local forums. many ppl wonder if the judge will accept them basing the case off a third party (backblaze's) report.

anyway, a number of forumers in my country have said that the best 3tb desktop drive is the toshiba one... cheap, fast and good and "borrowed" from hitachi...

BACKUP!BACKUP!BACKUP!

yes, i agree that how long a hard drive will last depends largely on luck assuming the psu is providing clean power, the drive is free from heavy vibration or sonic waves (noise) during operation and kept cool.

in physics, i would call "luck" as the uncertainty principle and personally, i think this principle can be applied to hard drives in theory since they consist of moving parts.

thus this lawsuit sets an interesting precedent. can a particular hard drive model or series be proven in a court of law to be more failure prone than others using both anecdotal and empirical evidence?

this reminds me of the nvidia bumpgate scandal class action lawsuit. one series of bga chips was found to be more failure prone and they won the case. so i hope all of u who bought seagate drives that failed get your money back.

i like how western economies treat the buyer/client/customer as the king since they are the ones coming out with the moolah. a truely good businessman knows that the customer is the real boss around here! i think i spent a couple of thousand dollars buying from western e-commerce sites. in contrast, i have still spent zero dollars on chinese e-commerce sites hahaha~

Why does this not surprise me? The only HDDs I've ever had fail were Seagate or Maxtor (which Seagate now owns) and none of them were particularly old, it may just be "bad luck", but I will never buy another Seagate HDD.

actually, what i blame for this hard drive failure fiasco is samsung, or rather seagate's acquisition of. not sure if u heard of the samsung f3 ecofail problem or if u experienced it yourself but i did. i think more of samsung's failed hard drive tech made it into seagate's tech and it reared its ugly head into the fiasco we see now...

BTW my WDs that dropped sectors was of the RE4 line.

aaaah! and i just bought some refurb wd 2tb wd2003fyys re4 drives on ebay just now! no wonder they were going so cheap...

[ratdude747]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

PS:
Get off that RAID SHIT! GET ZFS!

The only system I have that uses RAID for redundancy purpouses is the house's file server (Raid 5 of 3 500GB drives). Not redoing that rig again. The rest use it for performance reasons (RAID 0) and ZFS isn't worth the trouble (as all the important data is on the file server).

[ratdude747]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

actually, what i blame for this hard drive failure fiasco is samsung, or rather seagate's acquisition of. not sure if u heard of the samsung f3 ecofail problem or if u experienced it yourself but i did. i think more of samsung's failed hard drive tech made it into seagate's tech and it reared its ugly head into the fiasco we see now...

I doubt it. I once had a samsung 1TB 2.5" drive that was made post-merger; it was a 100% seagate drive (seagate-like model number too).