Seagate, well known for manufacturing various types of digital storage products, is now facing a class action lawsuit over the high failure rates of its 3TB hard drives. This includes both internal and external versions of the HDD. The specific model of the allegedly defective hard drive is the ST3000DM001.
The announcement came from a consumer rights law firm, Hagens Berman, which represents the consumers that filed the class action lawsuit against Seagate. Managing partner of Hagens Berman, Steve Berman, mentioned that Seagate has failed to deliver what it has promised to consumers that had bought the defective 3TB HDD. In addition to that, replacements provided for the hard drives were just as faulty, which amounted to data and monetary losses.
To put it into perspective, Backblaze – cloud storage provider – has presented detailed analytics of the Seagate 3TB HDD. In its HDD failure rate data, Backblaze mentioned that astonishingly, out of 4,190 Seagate 3TB HDD deployed in 2012, 1,342 of them failed. This accounts for a failure rate of about 32%, which is really bad when compared to the 3TB HDD by Western Digital which had a failure rate of only 4.5%.
In addition to that, the annual failure rate for Seagate HDDs bears the same outcome. When compared against Hitachi and Western Digital hard drives, it was clear that Seagate has a problem when it comes to manufacturing non-defective hard drives. Although it must be said that Seagate will look to counter the argument by mentioning the fact that Backblaze was not testing the hard from a typical consumer environment, which is what the 3TB HDD was intended for.
If the class action lawsuit goes against Seagate, the company could be smacked with a hefty fine to compensate for its negligence. Currently, Seagate still hasn’t responded to the lawsuit filed against it but we do expect the company to come out with some sort of statement sooner or later. Full details regarding the class action lawsuit can be found here and the full hard drive reliability statistics by Backblaze can be found here.
(Source: Overclock3D , ExtremeTech , Digital Trends)
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