Seagate slapped with class action lawsuit over defective hard drives

“Seagate is aware of the filing of a class action complaint on February 1, 2016, by plaintiff Christopher A. Nelson, in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California”.

“Seagate promised purchasers reliable hard drives that would safeguard their important documents and cherished photos, but consumers report that these Seagate hard drives fail sometimes just days after their first use”, said managing partner of Hagens Berman, Steve Berman. At the time, the report was criticised for being unrepresentative of real-world use: Backblaze purchases consumer-grade drives then installs them in server pods which run them 24-7, an environment better suited to enterprise-grade hardware. The company had over 4,200 Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 2TB drives and they found that they drives had a failure rate of almost 30% for the recorded period of time.

Berman added, “Plain and simple, consumers paid for a product that they did not receive, and we intend to fight for their rights to receive payback from Seagate”. “… Accordingly, only 68 percent of the Drives deployed in 2012 were operational after three years, which was well below Backblaze’s overall drive survival rate of 80 percent after four years“. The suit also 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 specifically relates to Seagate’s 3TB hard drive models: the Barracuda 3TB Hard Disk Drive, or the Backup Plus 3TB External Hard Disk Drive. Affected consumers may be able to recoup costs from replacing the drives, as well as expenses from data recovery.

Storage giant Seagate is the target of a proposed class-action lawsuit, filed regarding complaints that the company’s 3TB hard drives fail at a rate far above the industry average – sometimes within days of installation. But no matter what hard drive you own, make sure you’re backing up regularly because you never know when it could go.