When it comes to hard drives, failure rates are usually separated by mere percentages. This means the decision usually comes down to personal preference and availability of the speed and size you’re looking for.
If you’ve opted for any Seagate hard drives as of late though, specifically the 1.5TB and 3TB models, you might want to listen up, because these break the usual percentages and are failing at incredibly high rates, some not lasting more than a day.
As a result, Seagate is now on the defending side of a class action lawsuit due to the high failure rate and failure to replace the broken drives with working ones.
Just how bad were the failure rates? According to online backup service Backblaze, who has a history of thoroughly testing hard drives, upwards of 10% of 3TB drives and 13% of 1.5TB drives failed, a whopping five times higher than competitive drives.
Not only are the drives failing at incredibly high rates, customers who have sent in their drives per Seagate’s warranty program have received the same defective drives that they were trying to replace.
It’s for this reason that law firm Hagens Berman and Sheller has filed a class action lawsuit claiming Seagate didn’t properly hold its end of the warranty deal by replacing broken drives with equally faulty ones.
It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out in the long run. One way or the other, it doesn’t seem like it’ll pan out well for Seagate.
In the meantime, if you have one of the affected drives, you might want to transfer your information elsewhere and reach out to Seagate.
