There is a total absence of a legal argument. The drives were not faulty; they were misapplied and the test environment exploited a very important "feature" of consumer drives.
It's like buying US market electronics and then taking them to Europe and suing GE because they failed. Here you essentially have a piece of electronics that comes with a "switch" for either European or US electrical grids ... you purposely set it to the wrong one and then complain that it blew up. Consumer drives are normally equipped with a feature that protects them in a consumer environment. The presence of this feature, which can be removed with firmware, is what inevitably causes the drives to fail.
Like PSUs, relying on brand names if a fool's errand.... Simply put, saying you will use this or that "brand" because of experience with a specific model is foolish..... we have generations of people relying on their granndpa's allegiance to a truck brand and everyone in that family will forever be buying Fords "Cause Dodge and Chevy are unreliable" ... and then there is the hordes of Chevy and Dodge loyalists you ay the other two are unreliable... all without a hint of data to support their bias.. other than "grandpa had one and it broke".
True or false ... "Corsair makes great PSUs" ? The correct answer is yes, the correct answer is no. Some models are very good, some models are garbage.
True or false ... "The Corsair HX series are great PSUs" ? The correct answer is yes, the correct answer is no. The 750 and 850 models were great PSUs. The 1000 / 1050 model were dogs *by comparison*.
Component manufacturers are in business to make make money. If they weren't good at what they do .... if Seagate was the "most unreliable" as was claimed in the lawsuit", they would be gone. The fact that warranty returns show they have the lowest rate of drives returned, and by a large margin, should show the folly of this statement. The fact is that HD manufacturers, like PSU manufacturers, like car manufacturers compete in several market niches:
a) They all have products designed for different market niches. Corsair has the excellent Axi series and they have the crappy CX series. If you are going to buy the CX because of a review you read or experience you had with the AXi, you're being foolish.
b) Manufacturers innovate .... sometimes they hit home runs, sometimes they strike out.
- If you look at the storagereview.com database, you will find that Seagate made the
most reliable drive in the history of hard drives.
- If you look at the storagereview.com database, you will find that Seagate made the
least reliable drive in the history of hard drives.
The Seagate 7200.10 series was the most common drive supplied in Infant / Netgear NAS's by a large margin. It was a solid reliable drive. The 7200.11 was a bomb and the 7200.12 was very reliable.
If you look at the actual reliability data on the site linked to above, you will see many manufacturers with low overall warranty returns that also managed to produce some stinkers.
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/920-2/cartes-meres.html
Here we see Mobo Manufacturers stacking up as follows on 2014-04-30:
- Gigabyte 2,02% (contre 1,43%)
- ASROCK 2,27% (contre 2,09%)
- ASUS 2,31% (contre 1,86%)
- MSI 2,60% (contre 1,83%)
Notice the swings over a 6 month period.... should you make decisions based upon that ? But wait ? The Asus Rampage IV Extreme had almost 10% failures (-9,65% ). Over half of the MoBos on the worse performing list for Z77/Z87(10/19) were Asus. Do we base our purchase decision on the ASUS CM Z87-K (1,13%) or the Asus Sabertooth (4,95%)
Look at memory
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/920-4/memoires.html
Look at PSUs
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/920-3/alimentations.html
look at GFX cards
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/920-5/cartes-graphiques.html
The only constant is that all manufacturers have models on top of the list and some models on the bottom of the list.
"Seagate's excuse of their drives failing due to "not being designed" for these workloads is rubbish. It doesn't matter what tech they allegedly lacked, competitors' drives of the same tier and pricing turned out to be more reliable, and that's all a buyer needs to know."
That's all the buyer needs to know if the commentator is a technical Rush Limbaugh
The equivalent argument would be to argue that seat belts in a car are a bad move because a man found in the bottom of a lake with a seat belt on might have got out if he wasn't wearing a seat belt. The data that exists on seat belts is unassailable; seat belts save lives. Every time the scientific evidence is clear and obvious to 99.5% of those educated on the subject, there will be naysayers claiming that their grandfather smoked 3 packs a day and lived till he was 95.
It's a simple thing:
a) Most consumer drives are equipped with a protection feature called "head parking".
b) You can buy the exact same drive, mechanically, without head parking (different firmware).
c) Head parking returns the heads to a parked position between data requests. This protects the drive ina consumer environment subject to vibration.
d) In a typical consumer environment... the heads might be expected to park say 150,000 times, well below their design rating.
e) In a server environment, they might be parked 50,000 times in a month which will of course lead to premature failure.
The most ridiculous thing about the "support" for this Backblaze study is that the very drives that did well in the Backblaze study ... the ones without the protective head parking features ....are ill suited to a consumer. One good bump to your desk could result in the heads crashing the platters. You might as well fault an engine for bad performance after putting the wrong fuel or oil grade in.
The Backblaze study is not faulty because it subjected all drives to the same loads, it's faulty because the very protection features some of the drive were equipped with served to accelerate the failure of those drives.
And ... if we were to ignore reality and accept the Backblaze study ignoring how consumer protection features accelerate wear in a server environment, how can you explain the actual market data with how many drives are actually returned and replaced under warranty ? If Seagate is so unreliable and [insert whatever brand here] is so much better then how in the world have they managed to maintain the lowest rate of failed warranty returns for year after year after year ? Personally, I see no reason to avoid any manufacturer based upon overall brand failures.... I could live with 2 %; last test period we saw:
- Seagate 0,68%
- Western 1,09%
- HGST 1,16%
- Toshiba 1,34%
And none of those numbers would affect my decision making process. But the individual model lines, especially among the 3 and 4 TB drives, those I'd avoid.
- 4,58% WD Red WD60EFRX
- 3,40% Toshiba DT01ACA300
- 2,78% WD SE WD3000F9YZ
- 2,93% WD Green WD40EZRX
Its also interesting that where BB liked the WD drives they tested, as it relates to this case ....WD has 3 of the 4 four most failure prone drives. It is worth noting that things are improving...in the previous period...
- 4,76% WD Black WD4001FAEX
- 4,24% WD Black WD3001FAEX
- 3,83% WD SE WD3000F9YZ
In the latest report, the newer, improved WD Black did better
- 1,18% WD Black WD4003FZEX