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You are here: MacNN Forums > News > Mac News > Seagate sued over unreliable Barracuda, Backup Plus 3TB hard drives

Seagate sued over unreliable Barracuda, Backup Plus 3TB hard drives
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NewsPoster
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Feb 1, 2016, 01:43 PM
 
Lawyers representing consumers have filed a national class-action lawsuit against Seagate Technologies, claiming the data storage company sold hard drives that routinely failed at exceptionally high rates, leaving consumers with broken hardware and significant loss of data, according to Hagens Berman, the law firm attached to the suit. The claims filed today in the US District Court for the Northern District of California say that Seagate's hard drives failed to live up to the advertised promises, and violated federal consumer laws as well as Seagate's own warranties after delivering faulty replacement hard drives.

The complaint states that these particular hard drives were marketed as innovative, fast, powerful, reliable, dependable, and having extremely low failure rates, when in reality, the failure rate of the drives was substantially higher than advertised. Consumers report them failing at an unprecedented rate -- sometimes even days after their first use, according to the suit, and supplemented by reports published from data backup firm Backblaze. The 3TB Seagate drive was most commonly used in the late 2012 27-inch iMac, and Apple eventually issued a repair authorization extension program for it, in June of 2015.

Latest data from Backblaze on consumer HD reliability
Latest data from Backblaze on consumer HD reliability


"Seagate promised purchasers reliable hard drives that would safeguard their important documents and cherished photos, but consumers report that these Seagate hard drives [would] fail sometimes just days after their first use," said Steve Berman, a managing partner of Hagens Berman. "These hard drives failed to deliver on Seagate's promises, and replacements from Seagate were just as defective, amounting to loss of data and wasted money for thousands of purchasers -- something we believe to be direct violation of federal consumer-rights laws."

According to the firm's investigation, Seagate promised purchasers that it would replace the failed hard drives, but replacements were also defective and failed at extremely high rates, leaving Seagate's warranty promise unfulfilled, and consumers without working hard drives. The suit's named plaintiff suffered a complete unexpected failure and loss of data when his Backup Plus hard drive unexpectedly crashed, causing him to lose stored photos and documents. Less than a year after the plaintiff received the replacement drive from Seagate, it too failed.



Hagens Berman has set up an information page for current or past owners of the drives. The firm isn't promising anything, but notes that if consumers purchased Seagate's Barracuda 3TB Hard Disk Drive or Backup Plus 3TB External Hard Disk Drive, "you may be entitled to damages, including replacement costs and damages from loss of data and data recovery expenses."
( Last edited by NewsPoster; Feb 16, 2016 at 02:45 AM. )
     
prl99
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Feb 1, 2016, 02:00 PM
 
It's not just the 3TB model, it's just about all of them. I have several Seagate laptop drives waiting to be taken apart so I can save the magnet. They all failed in less than 3 years. Seagate will replace them but what good is that when they will just fail again?
     
Mike Wuerthele
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Feb 1, 2016, 02:04 PM
 
Perhaps, but this suit is just for the 3TB desktop drive.
     
zehspoon1
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Feb 1, 2016, 02:30 PM
 
My issue is that my drives were in an Other World Computing Thunderbolt case. I don't think I would be covered as Other World Computing replaced my drives. I have had to send it back twice in 3 years.
     
JackWebb
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Feb 1, 2016, 03:56 PM
 
We've had 20 years of warnings about Seagate drives failing. It's amazing this has been a problem all this time and quality never got fixed. My first two experiences with them were a 2GB and 9GB drive in 1995-96. Both of them randomly spun down. My only chance at saving data was slapping the drives in hopes of getting them to spin back up before the Mac froze and I lost data. Every Seagate I ever owned died in 1-2 years. I tried avoiding them but got a couple in a LaCie drive 10 years ago. When that died and I looked inside, I wasn't surprised to find Seagate. Never bought from LaCie again and buy only bare drives and build my own so I don't get the Seagate surprise. Meanwhile I have dozens of IBM/Hitachi/HGST/WD that never failed. Only had one failure on a Samsung and a Maxtor in the past 10 years. The Maxtor I think died due to over heating in the iMac G5 which was designed to have the CPU blow on the HDD. I have so many stories of Seagates failing including stories of helping tech support other people where recently the drive not spinning up reared it's head again last year. 20 years and the same problem! Amazing they are still in business.
     
Mike Wuerthele
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Feb 1, 2016, 04:15 PM
 
All vendors have had their issues, DeskStar (DeathStar) drives had a very bad reputation for the longest time. This batch of 3TB Seagates is particularly nasty.
     
Jeronimo2000
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Feb 1, 2016, 04:44 PM
 
Yes, all vendors have had their isssues, but some more than others. A great place to get an idea about reliability are those HD reports by Backblaze, here's the latest I've found:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-...ility-q3-2015/

They've gone through thousands of drives, so it's fair to say they got some authority on the subject.

As for Seagate, I too have been burned too many time by my repeated decision to purchase their drives. At long last, though, lesson learned. It's HGST all the way over here, no issues within the last couple of years.
     
Ham Sandwich
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Feb 1, 2016, 04:57 PM
 
A quote that I found in an old 90s book on using Macs, goes something like:

There are two types of hard drives: those that have failed; and those that have yet to fail.

^ This makes me suspicious of every hard drive, so one backup is never enough for me at this stage of my life.
     
prl99
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Feb 1, 2016, 05:01 PM
 
@Mike Yes, all vendors have had problems but @Jeronimo2000 is correct about Seagate drives demonstrating bad behavior in a huge Mac-centric storage facility (BackBlaze) (btw: Jeronimo, you need to fix your URL link, it's missing the : after https). I read this article awhile ago (did MacNN publish an article about this study?), which justified my decision to never, ever buy another Seagate drive again. I know you want to treat all vendors equally but in this case, the stats tell a true story. Seagate is failing as a hard drive manufacturer.
     
Mike Wuerthele
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Feb 1, 2016, 05:23 PM
 
Originally Posted by Jeronimo2000 View Post
Yes, all vendors have had their isssues, but some more than others. A great place to get an idea about reliability are those HD reports by Backblaze, here's the latest I've found:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-...ility-q3-2015/

They've gone through thousands of drives, so it's fair to say they got some authority on the subject.

As for Seagate, I too have been burned too many time by my repeated decision to purchase their drives. At long last, though, lesson learned. It's HGST all the way over here, no issues within the last couple of years.
I'm aware. We run their reports all the time, and that item you linked up there is also linked in the story.

There are two types of hard drives: those that have failed; and those that have yet to fail.
This is as true as it gets, folks.
     
panjandrum
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Feb 1, 2016, 05:37 PM
 
I've had mixed luck with Seagate drives. I've installed, in my own equipment, school-equipment, and end-user equipment, a considerable number of their 2.5" hybrid drives, along with a number of their newer 3.5" hybrids. And I've installed these in a wide-variety of hardware; laptops, desktops, even PS3s etc. And as far as I know every single one of them is still working flawlessly. So that's good. On the other hand, I've seen a HUGE number of failures of external Seagate 3tb drives (as has been well-documented) AND all their other external drives as well (not case-failures). I've been urging anyone with an external Seagate as their backup-drive to replace it as soon as possible, regardless of the capacity. So I think they've got some fundamental issues non-only with the 3tb drives, but also with their external enclosures (probably heat). It's interesting how this comes-around and goes-around. I remember a time when nobody would have touched a WD drive (for example) with a ten-foot-pole, but now it's Seagate. The bottom-line is that I don't mind using their hybrid-drives for internal installations as long as I know the system has a good (non-seagate!) backup in place, but I avoid anything else Seagate like the plague.
     
TheGreatButcher
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Feb 1, 2016, 05:52 PM
 
I tried some Seagate drives for my server about 6 years ago and had a couple fail on me. It seemed the ones made in Thailand were ok, but if they came from China... good luck. Since I made the switch to WD, I've been very satisfied.
     
Makosuke
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Feb 1, 2016, 06:16 PM
 
I'm glad somebody beat me to linking a Backblaze article. For all the random anecdotal evidence you hear about hard drives, Backblaze provides literally the *only* publicly available data with a statistically significant sample size that names manufacturers and models.

Here's an older article that doesn't have up-to-date data but does provide some very interesting graphs for visualization:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

They somewhat abuse consumer drives given the datacenter environment, but with the exception of drives that just don't like their setup (I think a particular model of WD Green at one point just couldn't handle the vibration or something, so simply wouldn't work), it's a statistically valid real-world stress test. Also no laptop drives, but given how similar the technology is, the results would probably be similar.

And the reality is that Seagate's 1.5TB Green drive has a catastrophically high failure rate in this use case (albeit with a very small sample), and the 3TB Seagate in question here has an unreasonably high failure rate with a very large sample size. Leaving those models aside, as of their current data, Seagate, WD, and Toshiba all have failure rates in the same ballpark. HGST (which is now a subsidiary of WD) does somewhat better than all the rest almost universally, although either way the failure rates are pretty low.

Point being, unless you got one of a particular bum model (like the famous IBM/Hitachi Deathstar drives of yesteryear, or this 3TB Seagate), any opinion you have about drive reliability is probably based more on luck than any statistical difference.

Personally, working in IT, I've been in charge of probably a couple hundred hard drives, cumulatively, over the years, and I've never really noticed any big difference. Based entirely on the BackBlaze results, though, I tend to spend the small premium on HGST desktop drives for my home primary backup.
     
Mike Wuerthele
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Feb 1, 2016, 07:08 PM
 
Charles just added the latest BackBlaze numbers to the story, for comparison's sake.
     
jasonsRX7
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Feb 1, 2016, 09:50 PM
 
I personally had seven of these 3TB Seagates fail over the last few years, and not a single one of my dozens of other HDs that are in use. I've had plenty of HD failures from every manufacturer in my life, but nothing with the failure rate of these particular Seagates. They're absolute garbage.
     
Feathers
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Feb 2, 2016, 12:24 PM
 
If you copy data to an external drive and then delete it from the source, it isn't a back-up! I don't know how many times I have told friends and colleagues that you need to have (at least) two copies of everything. A solitary copy is not a back-up and anybody who thinks that it is, is an idiot.
     
panjandrum
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Feb 2, 2016, 02:13 PM
 
@Feathers. Of course that is correct that you need at least 2 (and we all know you really want at least 3 total copies: 1 Primary copy, 1 routine backup, 1 offsite backup), but let's not forget that people are all good at different things. I know a lot of people who would make this mistake who are far, far from idiots. That's an attitude too many people who are good with computers take; that a person who doesn't understand computers is an idiot. It's just not true. I would trade my computer-skills in a second for the talents some of my clients have. Successful painter who sells at Christie's in New York? Check! Successful novelist and poet (successful as in earning a living doing it)? Check! Successful architect? Check! Brilliant conductor of well-regarded Symphony? Check! Those are not idiots, they are exceptionally intelligent and talented people. The confusion is that many, many external drives are clearly labeled as "Backup" drives. That's a problem because to most people that mean "what I put on this is safe." They don't realize it's just a perfectly-normal-unreliable drive in an external case (with reliability likely decreased because a lot of case designs don't provide sufficient cooling). Don't blame the end-user for that...
( Last edited by panjandrum; Feb 16, 2016 at 01:18 PM. )
     
panjandrum
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Feb 16, 2016, 01:17 PM
 
I was working on two systems this weekend, both with failed Seagate external drives less than 2 years old. One was getting media read failures (172 sector read failures over 160ish GB of data according to CCC), and the other was the typical "unable to spin-up" issue. Like I mentioned earlier, I've seen massive, absolutely massive, failure rates with anything external+Seagate. On the other hand, I decided to count up the number of 2.5" and 3.5" Seagate Hybrid drives I have currently functioning in equipment, and that number is (knock on wood): 11. So 11 Seagate hybrid drives installed in everything from a MacPro server to MacBooks and MacBook Pros to a custom-gaming PC to a lowly PS3, and not one of them has failed (double-knock-on-wood). Quite a few of them are the old 750gb 7200rpm 2.5" models as well, which are now quite old (I'm thinking 4 years?). So if those were following the typical Seagate failure rate, somewhere between 3 and 6 of them should have already failed. So, either I'm incredibly lucky or there is something different about the hybrid models (different factory?).
     
Steve Wilkinson
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Feb 16, 2016, 02:50 PM
 
I've got a couple of the 3TB Seagate drives in RAID 1, which has me a bit nervous (will have to check model numbers, but they are Seagate and 3TB). One of them has been a bit noisy compared to the other, so maybe that one is in trouble.

The Apple RAID software says they are both OK, but who knows if it's reporting correctly anymore? Kind of tricky to repair now at this point too... so I guess this means creating a new RAID, buying some good RAID software, transferring the data, and then turing these two drives into extra copy kinds of backups unless/until they need to be replaced.
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Steve Wilkinson
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Feb 16, 2016, 02:54 PM
 
Originally Posted by prl99 View Post
Yes, all vendors have had problems but @Jeronimo2000 is correct about Seagate drives demonstrating bad behavior .... which justified my decision to never, ever buy another Seagate drive again. I know you want to treat all vendors equally but in this case, the stats tell a true story. Seagate is failing as a hard drive manufacturer.
The thing is, a decade or two ago, Seagate was THE drive to buy when brands like Conner, WD, or the 'Deathstar' (IBM) drives were seen as Seagate is currently. So, you just have to kind of follow trends, it's not a 'never buy again' kind of thing... well, except for Iomega.

(Of course, I'm old of enough - or at least have been around computers long enough - to remember when a floppy-drive was a luxury, and worked with some of the early hard drives on Novell servers when you had to buy special 'certified' ones to get the server to recognize them.)
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