Seagate being sued for shoddy hard drives.

[jde]

For all of you unfortunate souls who got crap disks from Seagate, you might be able to get at least a modicum of relief.
https://www.hbsslaw.com/cases/seagate

FYI, I do not have any affiliation or connection to this firm or this case.

 

[Mirfster]

If you purchased Seagate’s Barracuda 3TB Hard Disk Drive, Backup Plus 3TB External Hard Disk Drive or another Seagate hard drive with model number ST3000DM001, you may be entitled to damages including replacement costs and damages from loss of data and data recovery expenses.

Lol, I have 5 of these drives and when the 1st one went belly-up yanked them all. They have been sitting in a corner just gathering dust. Maybe I'll see how this all pans out. But, the lawsuit is coming from a CA where everyone sues so guess we will just have to wait and see. /Paging Saul Goodman!

 

[jgreco]

/Paging Saul Goodman!

<Heisenberg voice> How do you know Saul?

 

[nightshade00013]

They should extend it to some other drives as well, from what I was reading even the 1TB, 1.5TB and 2TB drives were pretty bad off as well.

 

[Mirfster]

Exactly how does one accomplish an above 100% failure rate anyways? Are they so bad that they infect drives from other manufacturers? :p

 

[rsquared]

I think they weren't counting replacement drives in the denominator of that equation. E.g. Buy 100 drives and 75 fail and get an RMA. If 50 of the replacements fail you've got 125 failures out of an initial 100 drives.

Kind of a weird way to calculate it, but for the non Seagate drives with single digit failure rates it shouldn't budge the numbers very much...

 

[nightshade00013]

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q3-2015/

I think they weren't counting replacement drives in the denominator of that equation. E.g. Buy 100 drives and 75 fail and get an RMA. If 50 of the replacements fail you've got 125 failures out of an initial 100 drives.

Kind of a weird way to calculate it, but for the non Seagate drives with single digit failure rates it shouldn't budge the numbers very much...

You are correct, that is the way they are explaining it as well. Pretty much means that Seagate has failed QC and design miserably.

 

[BDMcGrew]

Yes, they are in fact so bad that they can virtually infect drives from other manufacturers by taking a whole controller bus down. I wish I was joking about that!

This is good information to know about and I'll be throwing my name in the hat. I have 50 of these little buggers that we bought 3 years ago before it was cool and before Backblaze published their findings. Over the course of the 1 year warranty period every single drive had failed and people were looking at me like I was nuts but by the end of the first year I had a whole server full of replacement drives with a refurbished sticker on them.

As the warranties all ended the drives continued to fail and were pulled until all 50 drives were toast. Finally out of sheer frustration and after getting no help from Seagate tech support I took to social media and someone from Seagate corporate contacted me and has since gotten 40 out of my 50 drives replaced with another 10 to be sent to me when they become available. Of course, upon receiving the replacements the first thing I did was the typical suggested burn in and I'm seeing failures already on drives I've had less than a week.

I will contact my rep at Seagate again before throwing my name into the suit but honestly I feel that relationship has worn thin and I doubt anything else will be accomplished by it.

I should note the most important detail I've taken away from dealing directly with corporate is that 1) Seagate is insisting there are no _known problems with this model of drive and 2) 20 of the bad drives got sent back to the standard warranty return address in Rancho Dominguez, CA but the remaining 20 were sent directly to the Seagate test lab in Oklahoma City, OK at their request. Seems to me they might indeed have some suspicion as to their reliability. And finally, 3) they are insisting as well that these drives are _not, _not, _not to be used in a production "data_center" type environment and are specifically designed for single installation desktop use. Well damn.... I'm sure glad to hear they'd have me install a single drive, prone to failures, in my desktop and entrust all my sentimental data to it.

At any rate, the WD Red's in my primary FreeNAS are fine. The secondary FreeNAS full of ST3000DM001's is not in production becuase the drives won't pass a burn-in test, go figure!

 

[jgreco]

Well damn.... I'm sure glad to hear they'd have me install a single drive, prone to failures, in my desktop and entrust all my sentimental data to it.

They liked to sell those as externals too. "Back up all your data onto our crappy drives!"

 

[mattbbpl]

But the ones 4TB and above are (reportedly) OK though?

 

[joeschmuck]

What struck me as funny/odd, this quote form the linked website above

Consumers have reportedly lost tons of data unexpectedly, as Seagate’s hard drives failed to live up to the advertised promises, violating consumer laws.

They used the phrase "tons of data". Seriously, from a legal service. I'd have said "significant amounts of data" or "substantial amounts of data" or similar.

Thankfully I haven't purchased a Seagate drive in many years.

 

[jde]

They used the phrase "tons of data".

The pleading standard for federal court in the US is a only requires a "short plain statement of the claim." FRCP 8. Now, if this claim were pursued in any other country I agree that it should be pleaded in terms of metric tons. ;)

 

[nightshade00013]

But the ones 4TB and above are (reportedly) OK though?

So far from the stats that are shown but I honestly would not put any faith in their track record. Remember the IBM "Deathstar" drives. They would randomly come up with the click of death and be toasted. I never bought one and stayed away from any of their drives after that.

I had a 2TB Seagate crap out on me and that was enough. I will not touch a seagate drive for a good long while for any reason. They knew that problems have been happening and kept on selling the drives worried more about the bottom line than doing the right thing which would have been making drastic changes and issuing a recall for replacement or refund.

 

[Yatti420]

Am I the only fan lol? If you saw how many WD Greens I have here you would be wondering how I abuse my WD drives and why they are all boxed.. To be honest I use 2TB Seagates and haven't had problems like I've experienced with the WD Greens from the get go.. I've read the blackblaze stuff.. My results aren't jiving with theirs but I dont use any 3/4tb etc.. No seagate greens etc etc.. Just the st2000dm001.. Various firmwares at this point..

 

[jgreco]

So far from the stats that are shown but I honestly would not put any faith in their track record. Remember the IBM "Deathstar" drives. They would randomly come up with the click of death and be toasted. I never bought one and stayed away from any of their drives after that.

I had a 2TB Seagate crap out on me and that was enough. I will not touch a seagate drive for a good long while for any reason. They knew that problems have been happening and kept on selling the drives worried more about the bottom line than doing the right thing which would have been making drastic changes and issuing a recall for replacement or refund.

So you lost a single drive and that was enough? Wow. That's crazy. I've got piles of dead hard drives from nearly every manufacturer, including many that no longer exist. Since there are really only three companies making hard disks these days (Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba)... and they've all had catastrophic runs in their histories ... what are you suggesting?

 

[mattbbpl]

So you lost a single drive and that was enough? Wow. That's crazy. I've got piles of dead hard drives from nearly every manufacturer, including many that no longer exist. Since there are really only three companies making hard disks these days (Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba)... and they've all had catastrophic runs in their histories ... what are you suggesting?

Do you actually keep them? If so, I'm guessing it's part of a data security procedure (retention being assumed to be safer than destruction)?

Or maybe you just like the mementos?

 

[Ericloewe]

Do you actually keep them? If so, I'm guessing it's part of a data security procedure (retention being assumed to be safer than destruction)?

Or maybe you just like the mementos? :p

They make great paperweights.

 

[jgreco]

I figure sooner or later someone'll find the rare earth magnets to be of value and offer me $10/drive. Maybe there'll be another market bubble in 5 or 10 years.

 

[nightshade00013]

So you lost a single drive and that was enough? Wow. That's crazy. I've got piles of dead hard drives from nearly every manufacturer, including many that no longer exist. Since there are really only three companies making hard disks these days (Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba)... and they've all had catastrophic runs in their histories ... what are you suggesting?

That along with a lot of other horror stories on their drives. Not to mention that it was pretty short lived. I am used to drives lasting ten years and beyond, I just sent off an older 120GB IDE Seagate drive to my father after running badblocks and smart tests and I know it was at least 8 years old as my wife had bought it before we got together. I know sometimes drives will go bad but I rarely have a high turnover rate. I still have drives that are in the 10 to 20 GB range that have spun for many years that still work fine if I need them for something.

 

[anodos]

Do you actually keep them? If so, I'm guessing it's part of a data security procedure (retention being assumed to be safer than destruction)?

Or maybe you just like the mementos? :p

You can partially disassemble them, add a clock mechanism and sell them on etsy as hipster time pieces.