Seagate facing class lawsuit

[Bonebreaker777]

http://www.***********.net/articles/...ailure_rates/1

Well, well, well...l

[DDY]

Calling it, $15 for those affected, claimable ten years from now.

http://www. **** .net/articles/storage/seagate_hit_with_class_action_lawsuit_for_high_failure_rates/1

So why is ***********, I mean Overclock 3D on the word filter?

[peterb]

Calling it, $15 for those affected, claimable ten years from now.

http://www. **** .net/articles/storage/seagate_hit_with_class_action_lawsuit_for_high_failure_rates/1

So why is ***********, I mean Overclock 3D on the word filter?

I don't know, but it is! Might be historical...

[malarkey95]

Seagate sell more 7200rpm hardrives than WD so that will factor in to the number of complaints of failure. And I doubt the class action law suit will get anywhere as they have acted within the law with regards to the warranty period, in Spain there is a minimum of 2 years maybe 3. Whilst in American and UK its 1

[smargh]

I haven't read the article, but perhaps these are the Seagates highlighted in the Backblaze reliability stats.

[edit... yup]

[abaxas]

I haven't read the article, but perhaps these are the Seagates highlighted in the Backblaze reliability stats.

[edit... yup]

You mean the stats where they used them out of spec and cried when they started to die ?

[Splash]

I *really* hope this isn't based solely on the Backblaze data - those guys were clearly using the drives outside of their designed use. I'm aware of a couple of the higher capacity models from a few years ago having a higher than normal failure rate, but if I recall these were cheaper disks with lower warranty periods.

A hard disk is a mechanical device, and will *always* fail at some point. People on the link posted by the OP complaining that a disk with photos on from 10 years ago failed - I'd say that 10 years is way longer than I'd necessarily expect a hard disk to last, dependent on use case.

I seem to recall someone on this site having issues with Seagate 8tb archive drives where they were clearly being used for a purpose different to their design because it was the cheapest way to obtain the capacity that they needed - is this Seagate's fault or the end user's?

That said: if they stated an MTBF that is significantly lower FOR A DECENT SAMPLE SIZE than that experienced then they may have a point.


My personal preference for disks in NAS devices is to mix and match different batches, models and vendors in the same array. This helps to mitigate against a single bad batch, model or vendor issue. It's not the cheapest way of doing things though.

[shaithis]

It should be the 2TB drives as well. I have seen a truly unbelievable number of failed Seagate drives in the past 2 years.....practically anything with DM001 in the model number.

[jag272]

I can't even begin to count the amount of Seagate drives, mostly Barracudas, that have failed me the last few years. Just using them in my home pc for OS and games and such, nothing out of spec. At one point we had one drive fail, ran Seatools or whatever their warranty checker was called, mailed the drive off when it failed the test, bought another one in the mean time. Few weeks later, maybe 2 months or so the newly bought drive had failed and the repaired drive had shown up a week prior so we just swapped them round. Repaired drive ran for 4 months then kicked the bucket again. Thats the worst scenario i've had with them, but I've had a long history of failing Seagate drives.

When I built this new PC I made sure to get WD drives and I've had 0 issues with it so far, and thats on blues not even blacks.

Edit: Was usually 500GB drives since they were still fairly big at the time.

[Agrippa]

I can't really see this class action lawsuit going anywhere. From what I've read, in tree-four different places, the suit appears to rest entirely on Backblaze data, supplemented with personal anecdotes. And as everyone ought to know, your personal anecdotal "evidence" is utterly worthless. Still, in the US every outlandish outcome is possible, or even probable.

I've no doubt that the specific Seagate drives in question have/had larger than normal failure rates, but personally I ran 10 of them in a raid for well over two years without a single issue. Likewise I also ran 8 of the old IBM "Deathstars" in RAID back in the day, probably one of the most fault-prone drives in history, for about the same length of time. At the time they were the best-performing drives I'd used by a long shot, so if I'd relied on my own personal experience I would no doubt have recommended them to all and sundry. Thankfully I'm not dim enough to think that my experiences are transferable to anybody else.

In general, over 20 years of computing and hundreds of drives from WD, Seagate, Quantum, Conner, Fujitsu, IBM, Hitachi, Samsung, Maxtor and more, it's really only Hitachi which stand out, as I've never had one of their drives fail. Nevertheless, all my current mechanical drives are Seagates and all have performed flawlessly for 8 months to nearly two years.

[shaithis]

And as everyone ought to know, your personal anecdotal "evidence" is utterly worthless.

Unless of course, you work in storage and sold and installed hundreds of drives each year.........which some of us may have done.

When you see a failure rate of around 50% over a 3 year period for a sample of around 300 drives, it's beyond anecdotal.

[Agrippa]

Then it's no longer a personal anecdote, but a professional assessment based on statistically relevant data - a different thing altogether and one I didn't address.

I simply find it ludicrous that people are chiming in for and against anything and everything based solely on their own personal, extremely limited, experience, as if that actually should have any bearing on anything other than their own subjective opinions.

[peterb]

Although personal anecdote, I suspect that many hdd problems stem from the way they are handled during transit. I don't think I've ever had a retail package drive fail prematurely, but I have had a couple of OEM drives fail, and looking back, they weren't well packaged.

I have never had a prematurely failed OEM drive from Scan (who use copies amounts of bubble wrap) but I have from other suppliers.

Like Aggrippa, I tend to prefer Hitachi for mission critical applications, and before that Samsung. However my sample is not at all statistically significant (except to me )

[Agrippa]

However my sample is not at all statistically significant (except to me )

And that's the crux of the matter. I certainly make my own purchases partly based on my own experiences, but hopefully I'll never be so utterly infantile as to tell somebody else that "product X is crap/brilliant" based simply on whether or not a few samples of it worked well for me.

I'm totally with you on OEM drives and handling during transit by the way. Based on the condition of some of the deliveries I've received through the years I've often suspected that postal workers spend their breaks playing football with conveniently sized parcels.

[AGTDenton]

In my experience since Seagate dropped the 5 year warrantees on their drives the quality has noticeably suffered.
At home anything I've bought Seagate wise since 2012 have all failed before drives bought earlier and they are all still going strong.

Until recently all of our drives were Seagate at work, replacement ones are just not lasting at all, failures anywhere in the 1st 12months. We've started to go HGST so we'll see how that pans out.

[Bonebreaker777]

...I have never had a prematurely failed OEM drive from Scan (who use copies amounts of bubble wrap) but I have from other suppliers...

I had DoA drives from Scan. Funny enough, multiple drives in the same package (2x I believe) but only one was dead