Seagate Hit with Class Action Lawsuit for High Failure Rates

[NumLock21]

1 hour ago, Pohernori said:

Lol. I have 2 seagate drives in my pc. Does this mean I get a dollar or what?

You get a coupon that says 5% on your next Seagate hard drive purchase. Lol

[deviant88]

Good seagate sucks ass, my 500gb barracuda died after 4 years.

[daniellearmouth]

Just now, deviant88 said:

Good seagate sucks ass, my 500gb barracuda died after 4 years.

Oh babbah...

My 2TB died after a year and a few days. Join the queue.

[Doobeedoo]

Such stupidity and so called lame "evidence" this lawsuit may turn out to be funny in the end.

I have one 1TB and one 3TB Seagate drives for quite a while and they run for good amount every day and zero issues with them. 

[skatblast]

Ive had 10 seagate drives and have never had one fail

[Tasuma]

Oh yea! I've never had a seagate drive and all of mine have failed! But really, I used an old 750gb one from a client who gave me an old PC and it was fine. It was a few years old at that point. Pretty sure it was on the verge of dying but replaced it when I got my 1tb blue. Seemed to work fine personally.

[Mathematical]

This is well known. I do not know why anyone still purchases seagate.

[ADM-Ntek]

while i think that this lawsuit is bullshit i have to admit that this far i have only made bad experiences with Seagate.

[LAwLz]

21 hours ago, Notional said:

Seagate simply just make shitty drives. At least on the consumer side. I still don't see the issue with Backblaze. The WD drives are also consumer drives, and they don't crap out as much.

Either way, seems like 3TB drives in general has issues on all manufacturers. I wonder why that is? New data density on the platters or?

My WD black 2 TB just died, and I can't be arsed to get a new mechanical, so Samsung 850 500GB for me. I'd rather have less capacity than noisy crappy drives.

I would really appreciate it if your could stop spewing your unfounded hatred for Seagate on here. You are just making people more dumb.

Here are some actual, scientific, non-biased numbers for what consumers can expect in terms of reliability from different hard drive manufacturers:

On 1/13/2016 at 9:13 PM, LAwLz said:

Last year Seagate had the lowest failure rates of any HDD manufacturer. These are the % of drives RMA'd within a year after purchase:
Seagate - 0.68%
Western Digital - 1.09%
HGST - 1.16%
Toshiba - 1.34%
 
The top most unreliable hard drives, and their RMA rates were:
WD Red WD60EFRX - 4,58%
Toshiba 3 To DT01ACA300 - 3,40%
WD Green 4 To WD40EZRX - 2,93%
WD SE 3 To WD3000F9YZ - 2,78%
Hitachi Ultrastar A7K2000 - 2,14%

Seagate drives are some of the most reliable ones you can buy, but only if you buy their consumer drives and use them for consumer-tier workloads. If you buy consumer-tier drives and run them 24/7 in huge server racks with lots of vibrations, heat and under constant load then yes, they will be unreliable (at least their 3TB ones). If you however buy any of their drives, put them in your desktop or home NAS then they will be not just "fine", but actually more reliable than drives from for example Western Digital, on average. Anyone who claims that consumers should not buy Seagate drives because they are unreliable is ignorant (in your case, willfully ignorant).

 

 

By the way, Backblaze's failure report also shows that for example the WD Red 3TB has around 8% failure rate. I mean come on... You'd have to be a complete moron to use that as a guideline on how reliable the WD Red is, right?

I do think threads like these are kind of funny though. It makes it very apparent which people just parrot things they have heard other people say, and which people actually do their own bit of research and draw their own conclusions based on the evidence they gather.

[DaltonM]

Thought I would share my experience with seagate drives, this is a small fraction of what I have/have already disposed of:

Those are a few dead 3000gb drives. I get them everyday. 

[AlTech]

23 hours ago, daniellearmouth said:

And some people question why I refused to recommend their 2TB Barracuda drive for a while.

That said, it WAS only some drives that were affected...

Were the 1TB ones affected?

 

[Notional]

22 hours ago, Comic_Sans_MS said:

Why do these class actions exist?

You are NOT going to make money off the effected drives, you are just being a pain.

Because the US doesn't really have or believe in regulations. That is why frivolous lawsuits and class action lawsuits exist. They are designed to punish companies financially for lying, manipulating or not living up to their promises and responsibilities.

People might not really get much out of it, but they do get revenge or justice.

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

I would really appreciate it if your could stop spewing your unfounded hatred for Seagate on here. You are just making people more dumb.

Here are some actual, scientific, non-biased numbers for what consumers can expect in terms of reliability from different hard drive manufacturers:

Seagate drives are some of the most reliable ones you can buy, but only if you buy their consumer drives and use them for consumer-tier workloads. If you buy consumer-tier drives and run them 24/7 in huge server racks with lots of vibrations, heat and under constant load then yes, they will be unreliable (at least their 3TB ones). If you however buy any of their drives, put them in your desktop or home NAS then they will be not just "fine", but actually more reliable than drives from for example Western Digital, on average. Anyone who claims that consumers should not buy Seagate drives because they are unreliable is ignorant (in your case, willfully ignorant)

By the way, Backblaze's failure report also shows that for example the WD Red 3TB has around 8% failure rate. I mean come on... You'd have to be a complete moron to use that as a guideline on how reliable the WD Red is, right?

I do think threads like these are kind of funny though. It makes it very apparent which people just parrot things they have heard other people say, and which people actually do their own bit of research and draw their own conclusions based on the evidence they gather.

This is a class action lawsuit made by consumers, not Backblaze. All of these consumers have had defective products and either gotten it replaced by new defective products or none at all.

Backbllazes numbers are 100% legitimate. All drives are tested similarly, but Seagates drives just dies faster. Sure they are put in extreme situations, but that's how you test things. Remember that 1Petabyte SSD test? Yeah that's not normal usage either, but it still paints a picture of the reliability of the drives.If the test was Seagate consumer drives versus WD enterprise drives, then fair enough, but that is not the case. It's an apples to apples comparison, whether people like it or not.

Now the numbers are primarily due to 2 issues:

1. The 7200.11 series was abysmal with a failure rates of up to 50% within a year. They had defective firmwares that would brick the vast majority of the drives within a month or two. Mine died (I even reset the firmware using hyperterminal with a USB to serial port and removing the PCB). Backblazes drives dropped like flies, completely in conjunction with the consumer experience.
2. 3 TB drives seems to have fundamental issues. Not just on Seagate, but also WD. Idk if it's because of platter density going into a new generation or whatever, but it does hit Seagate pretty damn hard.

Seagate crapped all over itself with the 7200.11 series and has never really been good since. Blaming WD flooding makes no sense. Only Seagate is responsible for quality, and they have failed.

Your numbers doesn't show the picture of the life time of these new drives. Especially within guarantee or MTBF. So they really don't say all that much.

5 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Were the 1TB ones affected?

The 7200.11 was badly affected.

[AlTech]

1 minute ago, Notional said:

Snip

I own a 1TB 7200rpm Barracuda. So far it hasn't failed.

[Notional]

7 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

I own a 1TB 7200rpm Barracuda. So far it hasn't failed.

I specifically mentioned 7200.11. You might have a newer model, like 7200.14 or something like that?

I used to only get Seagate. (Only had Quantum and Maxtor before that.. ugh Maxtor). I still have my 80GB Seagate Sata gen 1 drive, and a 250GB Seagate sata gen 2 drive working after all these years. But with the 7200.11 series, they failed epicly and they never seemed to get back from that. But who cares, they are irrelevant in 5 years anyways.

[Nineshadow]

Are they seriously citing Blackblaze on this lawsuit?

...

[HalGameGuru]

I've had a bunch of 1TB drives fail. As a percentage of those bought retail and installed maybe as high as 30% within 2 years. The 2TB drives I've installed I have yet to have a single failure. I have no 3TB drives to comment on. Shied away from Seagate for those.  And almost every "slim" mechanical laptop harddrive from Seagate has failed within a year (the little 7mm platter drives).

I haven't had any real "failures" from Western Digital, one or two from Samsung (bad use case for those) and one or two Hitachi/HGST/Toshiba. Aside from the Seagate 1TB drives most all of the other failures were mostly due to improper use or shock.

[comicsansms]

40 minutes ago, Notional said:

Because the US doesn't really have or believe in regulations. That is why frivolous lawsuits and class action lawsuits exist. They are designed to punish companies financially for lying, manipulating or not living up to their promises and responsibilities.

People might not really get much out of it, but they do get revenge or justice.

This is a class action lawsuit made by consumers, not Backblaze. All of these consumers have had defective products and either gotten it replaced by new defective products or none at all.

Backbllazes numbers are 100% legitimate. All drives are tested similarly, but Seagates drives just dies faster. Sure they are put in extreme situations, but that's how you test things. Remember that 1Petabyte SSD test? Yeah that's not normal usage either, but it still paints a picture of the reliability of the drives.If the test was Seagate consumer drives versus WD enterprise drives, then fair enough, but that is not the case. It's an apples to apples comparison, whether people like it or not.

Now the numbers are primarily due to 2 issues:

1. The 7200.11 series was abysmal with a failure rates of up to 50% within a year. They had defective firmwares that would brick the vast majority of the drives within a month or two. Mine died (I even reset the firmware using hyperterminal with a USB to serial port and removing the PCB). Backblazes drives dropped like flies, completely in conjunction with the consumer experience.
2. 3 TB drives seems to have fundamental issues. Not just on Seagate, but also WD. Idk if it's because of platter density going into a new generation or whatever, but it does hit Seagate pretty damn hard.

Seagate crapped all over itself with the 7200.11 series and has never really been good since. Blaming WD flooding makes no sense. Only Seagate is responsible for quality, and they have failed.

Your numbers doesn't show the picture of the life time of these new drives. Especially within guarantee or MTBF. So they really don't say all that much.

The 7200.11 was badly affected.

I am pretty sure that one of the of my HDDs I use all the time is a 7200.11, it hasn't failed, it was from a computer that someone smashed up and it is still fine. 

[Dabombinable]

For those who say anything about backblaze, all HDD are running under the same conditions, and even if twice or triple the amount of Seagate HDD are used than Hitatachi and Western Digital, the failure rates are still a shitload higher.

[HalGameGuru]

Do not forget a lot of those company wide failure rates include specific models that have High RMA due to no fault of the manufacturer. There are a lot of people who buy drives like the WD Red's thinking they are good for data storage but not having them in a NAS or a specific RAID style setup with error compensation. Any RED drive used outside of its specific use case WILL have data corruption and eventually cause massive headaches. Just like running a Consumer drive in a server farm, using a consumer drive in a DVR, using a NAS drive in a consumer PC, or using any mechanical drive in any physically unsecured manner.

[daniellearmouth]

57 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

I own a 1TB 7200rpm Barracuda. So far it hasn't failed.

If you bought your model some time in 2014 or later, that may be why.

The 2011 model had catastrophic failure issues. Mine was one of those.

[kirashi]

1 hour ago, Notional said:

Because the US doesn't really have or believe in regulations. That is why frivolous lawsuits and class action lawsuits exist. They are designed to punish companies financially for lying, manipulating or not living up to their promises and responsibilities.

People might not really get much out of it, but they do get revenge or justice.

This is a class action lawsuit made by consumers, not Backblaze. All of these consumers have had defective products and either gotten it replaced by new defective products or none at all.

Backbllazes numbers are 100% legitimate. All drives are tested similarly, but Seagates drives just dies faster. Sure they are put in extreme situations, but that's how you test things. Remember that 1Petabyte SSD test? Yeah that's not normal usage either, but it still paints a picture of the reliability of the drives.If the test was Seagate consumer drives versus WD enterprise drives, then fair enough, but that is not the case. It's an apples to apples comparison, whether people like it or not.

Now the numbers are primarily due to 2 issues:

1. The 7200.11 series was abysmal with a failure rates of up to 50% within a year. They had defective firmwares that would brick the vast majority of the drives within a month or two. Mine died (I even reset the firmware using hyperterminal with a USB to serial port and removing the PCB). Backblazes drives dropped like flies, completely in conjunction with the consumer experience.
2. 3 TB drives seems to have fundamental issues. Not just on Seagate, but also WD. Idk if it's because of platter density going into a new generation or whatever, but it does hit Seagate pretty damn hard.

Seagate crapped all over itself with the 7200.11 series and has never really been good since. Blaming WD flooding makes no sense. Only Seagate is responsible for quality, and they have failed.

Your numbers doesn't show the picture of the life time of these new drives. Especially within guarantee or MTBF. So they really don't say all that much.

The 7200.11 was badly affected.

Can confirm the 7200.11 series were absolute crap. It wasn't even Seagates' inability to fix the firmware caching bugs.
For those who don't know, basically if the write-cache filled up completely, the drive would freeze as the cache would not actually write-out data to the platters.
This happened if you wrote a specific size of smaller-ish files, or the drive managed to fill it's own cache during a large continuous write.
Or (for me) literally anytime I slept or woke up my computer from sleep or hybernation state.
I had a 1.5TB 7200.11, the worst offender in the series. The smaller the drive, the less it was affected.

No, the best part was Seagate denying anything was ever wrong with the drives, until the community on Seagates' since-deleted/migrated forums performed some very specific tests with small groups of files during writes to the drive. Seagate finally acknowledged the problems, and released 2 firmware updates, neither of which actually resolved the caching issue.
One of the firmware update was actually designed to slow down writes to the drive in hopes that users wouldn't fill up the cache as often.
All of the recent information and press releases from Seagate point to a BuSY state during a power on as the root cause, which happens due to a full cache.

Seagate then claimed that it didn't matter anymore as all these drives were now at least 3 years old and thus completely out of warranty.
(This wasn't exactly public information unless you emailed them attempting to open a warranty claim due to the firmware bug.)
(Also note that while some users were given the run around, others were actually offered free data recovery services.)
It wasn't until I recently discovered The Solution for Seagate 7200.11 HDDs over at msfn.org that I knew of a solution.

TL;DR: Seagate manufactured an entire series of defective drives, denied it, made the drives worse with firmware updates, then said "bite me" to their customers.

[daniellearmouth]

3 minutes ago, kirashi said:

Can confirm the 7200.11 series were absolute crap. It wasn't even Seagates' inability to fix the firmware caching bugs.
For those who don't know, basically if the write-cache filled up completely, the drive would freeze as the cache would not actually write-out data to the platters.
This happened if you wrote a specific size of smaller-ish files, or the drive managed to fill it's own cache during a large continuous write.
Or (for me) literally anytime I slept or woke up my computer from sleep or hybernation state.
I had a 1.5TB 7200.11, the worst offender in the series. The smaller the drive, the less it was affected.

No, the best part was Seagate denying anything was ever wrong with the drives, until the community on Seagates' since-deleted/migrated forums performed some very specific tests with small groups of files during writes to the drive. Seagate finally acknowledged the problems, and released 2 firmware updates, neither of which actually resolved the caching issue.
One of the firmware update was actually designed to slow down writes to the drive in hopes that users wouldn't fill up the cache as often.
All of the recent information and press releases from Seagate point to a BuSY state during a power on as the root cause, which happens due to a full cache.

Seagate then claimed that it didn't matter anymore as all these drives were now at least 3 years old and thus completely out of warranty.
(This wasn't exactly public information unless you emailed them attempting to open a warranty claim due to the firmware bug.)
It wasn't until I recently discovered The Solution for Seagate 7200.11 HDDs over at msfn.org that I knew of a solution.

TL;DR: Seagate manufactured an entire series of defective drives, denied it, made the drives worse with firmware updates, then said "bite me" to their customers.

And - again - people wonder why I refused on principle to recommend a Seagate drive to anyone for a while.

[kirashi]

1 minute ago, daniellearmouth said:

And - again - people wonder why I refused on principle to recommend a Seagate drive to anyone for a while.

Well, arguably, their drives manufactured after some date late in 2009 don't have this problem.
And I'd like to note that although I still own and use my 7200.11 1.5TB drive to this day, it has yet to actually fail on me. Still fills up the cache and slows right down or freezes from time to time, but it works. I've actually had more full drive failures from Hitachi and WD than Seagate, and I own more Seagate drives than either of those brands.

[daniellearmouth]

Just now, kirashi said:

Well, arguably, their drives manufactured after some date late in 2009 don't have this problem.
And I'd like to note that although I still own and use my 7200.11 1.5TB drive to this day, it has yet to actually fail on me. Still fills up the cache and slows right down or freezes from time to time, but it works. I've actually had more full drive failures from Hitachi and WD than Seagate, and I own more Seagate drives than either of those brands.

Mine died a few days after the warranty expired, which was one year, which was already a short amount of time for something that's supposed to store a lot of information for an extended period of time.

Conversely, neither my WD Green or Toshiba drive - which I have had for one year and two years respectively - haven't so much has given me issues.

I did DBAN my Toshiba drive since I wanted rid of the Windows install on it and wanted the performance back, but right now, it's serving me well and will probably continue to do so for a good few years to come.

[Mayaa]

I have a 3TB Seagate harddrive that i have had for a good 3 years+ now and its still alive and kicking. Maybe i got lucky i suppose.

I have been buying WD drives as my new drives though.