Monday, February 1st 2016
Seagate Hit with Class Action Lawsuit over High HDD Failure Rates
Hard drive major Seagate has been hit with a class action lawsuit, accusing it of abnormally high failure rates for its 1.5 TB and 3 TB internal and external/portable hard drives. It also accuses the company of false claims over "reliability" and "dependability" in its marketing.
The lawsuit cites data aggregated by cloud solutions company Backblaze. According to this data, a 3 TB Seagate hard drive is three times as likely to fail, as a Western Digital (WD) 3 TB hard drive. It's also ten times as likely to fail as a Hitachi drive. The data appears to look at percentage failure rate, and not raw failed drive volumes, so market-share and volumes shipped by each company is not relevant. Seagate is yet to respond to the lawsuit.
Source:
OC3D
The lawsuit cites data aggregated by cloud solutions company Backblaze. According to this data, a 3 TB Seagate hard drive is three times as likely to fail, as a Western Digital (WD) 3 TB hard drive. It's also ten times as likely to fail as a Hitachi drive. The data appears to look at percentage failure rate, and not raw failed drive volumes, so market-share and volumes shipped by each company is not relevant. Seagate is yet to respond to the lawsuit.
48 Comments on Seagate Hit with Class Action Lawsuit over High HDD Failure Rates
I think to get the old times reliability you need to look at disks with 5 years warranty, WD RE like, which are significantly more expensive than mainstream disks.
If something dies within those computers, it will be the hard drive in most cases. Note - it is not that often it happens, but it has kinda made me think that these drives may fail sooner that I would like to.
Samsung had very solid and cheap drives (remember those sweet 1 and 2TB models before prices were artificially jacked up b/c of the flood). I bet Sammy regretted the sale b/c drives doubled in price overnight LOL.
I have a real Samsung 1TB and it's a beast (5 yrs old).
Backblaze are a bargain basement data storage company, they build file servers out of consumer HDDs and pack them into densely populated homemade enclosures that starve them of air and run ridiculously hot, their data on failure rates is no more relevant to the consumer than McLarens failure rate of Honda engines in Formula one.
All their data shows is that Seagate's consumer drives are more likely to die if subjected to stupid levels of torture which are completely incomparable to consumer usage.
I assume this is the real deal and not a SG rebrand. I notice they state that it uses very little power and runs cool. Open Hardware Monitor agrees with this. It's at 31c with a crappy case with no intake fan.
I'm actually gonna get a 2tb drive in 2 days because I'm tired of deleting stuff from this 500gb drive. I'm going with Hitachi if able, or maybe Toshiba since I can't really find anything on them. I figure they can't be worse than WD.There's still thousands of drives tested in the same conditions and the numbers don't lie. (at least, not to my knowledge, unless they are trying to make SG look bad)
That's effectively the situation here, all the drives are consumer level drives yet they are being subjected to a ridiculous amount of abuse, far beyond what any enterprise drive would normally be subjected to. The extra failure rate of the Seagate drives is irrelevant because it's not a situation any of the drives will ever encounter, it's an artificial situation created by Backblazes greed.
WD RE is what I would go for with a server build. However they are expensive and with SSD prices dropping, I think my choice will start to change soon.
Also, why doesn't anyone every pick up on the fact that, according to BlackBlaze, one of the WD models had a 100% failure rate?
A better source of failure rates is this. They actually track consumer return rates. And the reality is they are pretty close together.