Seagate Hit with Class Action Lawsuit over High HDD Failure Rates

[btarunr]

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.



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[Athlon2K15]

great source for their data, lol. I wouldnt trust backblaze with a KB of my data.

 

[Chaitanya]

Seriously Seagate needs to wake up about their overall quality of harddrives. Also both WD and Seagate should lower the prices of drives as it seems like SSDs are getting more and more affordable enough to replace the HDDs.

 

[TheGuruStud]

Big surprise. Seagate has been junk for more years than I can remember.

 

[buggalugs]

interesting about Hitachi.....How does Samsung fare? I only have one spinning drive left and its not in my main PC.

 

[geon2k2]

Indeed reliability went down pretty hard on the hard drive side, however they also got cheaper.

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.

 

[Rowsol]

interesting about Hitachi.....How does Samsung fare? I only have one spinning drive left and its not in my main PC.

Yea, me too. I have a Samsung Spinpoint that runs a lot and it's about 4 years old.

 

[jigar2speed]

I need to get myself some Hitachissss...

 

[Easo]

Purely from my experience with HP business line of desktops, which are using Seagate drives by default.
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.

 

[natr0n]

This is hilarious they've been selling shit for the longest time.

 

[TheGuruStud]

interesting about Hitachi.....How does Samsung fare? I only have one spinning drive left and its not in my main PC.

Western Digital has owned Hitachi for almost as long as Crapgate has owned Samsung.

Yea, me too. I have a Samsung Spinpoint that runs a lot and it's about 4 years old.

Seagate bought Samsung's HDD division in 2011. That's why they went to shit, too. You could still get rebadged Samsung hardware for a while, but Crapgate didn't continue production.

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).

 

[Countryside]

I'm so used to using SSDs because hdds remind me of 1990s that nice grinding sound and thous low speeds and nice failure rates

 

[TheGuruStud]

interesting about Hitachi.....How does Samsung fare? I only have one spinning drive left and its not in my main PC.

But SSDs won't get you a 21TB NAS unless you have some decent spending cash. I speak from experience LOL

 

[Countryside]

But SSDs won't get you a 21TB NAS unless you have some decent spending cash. I speak from experience LOL

 

[TheGuruStud]

Mine is already almost filled...there was no waiting. I'm going to need to build another one or upgrade to 6TB drives.

 

[Ubersonic]

The lawsuit cites data aggregated by cloud solutions company Backblaze.

Erm, so the lawsuit has no actual evidence/data to support it then? lol.

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.

 

[Rowsol]

Western Digital has owned Hitachi for almost as long as Crapgate has owned Samsung.


Seagate bought Samsung's HDD division in 2011. That's why they went to shit, too. You could still get rebadged Samsung hardware for a while, but Crapgate didn't continue production.

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).

Thanks for the info. I have the 500gb model shown here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/2tb-hdd-7200,2430-2.html

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.

Erm, so the lawsuit has no actual evidence/data to support it then? lol.

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.

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)

 

[Jack1n]

I actually found WD to be most reliable, followed by Hitachi and with Seagate being the absolutely worst.

 

[Ubersonic]

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)

It's not really that simple, the numbers don't lie but the context does. To use a hypothetical example, imagine two watches, one can survive being submerged in water to 50 feet, the other can survive being submerged in water to 50,000 feet, that means if they are used by divers then the will be a big disparity in the failure rate, however if they are used normally by the general public then nobody will see a real difference.

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.

 

[Rowsol]

It's not really that simple, the numbers don't lie but the context does. To use a hypothetical example, imagine two watches, one can survive being submerged in water to 50 feet, the other can survive being submerged in water to 50,000 feet, that means if they are used by divers then the will be a big disparity in the failure rate, however if they are used normally by the general public then nobody will see a real difference.

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.

There's some relevance to your point so I will not pursue this argument any further. I do however think that given the numbers, it would be foolish for anyone to buy a SG drive if they can get another brand at the same $/GB.

 

[wolar]

Told you.. i would never buy a seagate hdd and WD unless it was WD-black-WD red-pro, which HGST Deskstar Nas is way cheaper and maybe more reliable.

 

[Parn]

With this kind of failure rate, no wonder why Seagate offer only 1-year warranty with their 7200.12 drives.

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.

 

[Prima.Vera]

interesting about Hitachi.....How does Samsung fare? I only have one spinning drive left and its not in my main PC.

I have both Hitachi and Samsung for almost 10 years now, and except for some noise, they are good as new. Seagate on the other hand are THE WORST drives ever. Maybe just OCZ is worst than them on the old SSDs... Ditched this shitty company long time ago.

 

[newtekie1]

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

That entire study was total bullshit. The company uses desktop drives in servers in RAID. And their definition of failure was that the RAID controller kicked the drive out of the array and labeled it as failed. Well, that is what happens when you use desktop drives with server RAID controllers. The controllers are picky, and just don't like some drives. The 1.5TB drives had high failure rates because most of the 1.5TB sector were LP drives, which really don't get along with picky RAID controllers.

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.

 

[wrathchild_67]

Erm, so the lawsuit has no actual evidence/data to support it then? lol.

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.

They've been compiling these results for years. The trend is consistent. I've given Seagate multiple chances and they have failed me every time. I had six 1.5TB 7200.11 drives that all failed due to the notorious mechanical defects in that line. Then I foolishly bought two 4TB consumer grade fileservers a few years ago. I have only actually used one of them for storage and it is failing, the same way that so many others have had it fail. This was a drive that sat idle, heads parked, a majority of the time. At this point, I'm not even sure I want to use the second one.