Class-Action Lawsuit Against Seagate Built On Questionable Backblaze Reliability Report

[Anders235]

Massive, parallel, double-blind, peer-reviewed testing of consumer hard drives is what is now needed to get to the bottom of this perilous issue.

Hard drives should be subject to the same kind of rigorous testing that the FDA requires before a new pharmaceutical is brought to market.

/s

 

[Karadjgne]

Ok. My 2¢.

I read the report. A colossal waste of energies in my opinion. And here's why. It's impossible to test drives in perfect scenarios and get accurate results. Those drives were tested well above operating parameters, of course they will fail. I have a case that uses sideways mounted hdds, requires the use of 90° Sata connectors. Even then, the connection itself is stressed by wiring angles. Using a hdd with a standard Sata connection would result in premature failure for sure. It's no different than the previously mentioned car analogy. You take a 4x4 1500series truck and run it around town in 4low,you will break the suspension or drive, just a matter of time. Use a 3500 series, kiss your tires goodbye first. Or run that Toyota corolla around a 4x4 mud track, the drive axles on the front will fail quick, they aren't built for that abuse. But run it around town and 200k miles is easy to obtain.

Return rates, pointed out by jackNaylorPe are even questionable, that's end-user returns with no data on exactly why the return was necessary. We're they hard mount permanent drives without stressed connections, drives fried from bad psus or mobo's, drives subjected to dirty environs, overheated, dropped, whatever. Or it may be a case of some of those drives being aftermarket and some OEM so having greater % of possible failure rate than just a few aftermarket. 0.9% of 100k units is a much larger % than 2% of 1M units, comparatively.

My point is this. Hdds fail. Always have, always will. Usage, environs, situations are just a few variables to take into consideration, and some drives are a little more heavy-duty than others (WD Black vrs Blue), so choice of which hdd to use is more important than price or brand.

 

[amk-aka-Phantom]

So I assume that you have worked on data centers where the information has to be 100% correct then? Most high servers and most company servers require ECC. Most lower end servers, small ones, do not.

But hey, go ahead and argue with years of IT professionals and people who design this stuff for a living.

I did say *most* servers. You want to run anything really critical, go ahead and invest in ECC... as well as double PSUs, failover UPS, generators, every precaution is worth it, but on this list, ECC would be the last thing I'd be worried about (where I work, it's more likely that power will be cut for 6 hours straight - in fact, that happens every week at least once - than a random error in an otherwise healthy DIMM occurs). I'm just sick of people bringing up ECC whenever a word "server" comes up and yes, I will argue because I've also done my research and most IT professionals seem to be in agreement that ECC isn't nearly as relevant as it used to be. RAM has gotten more reliable, less error-prone and easier to troubleshoot over the years. The need for ECC is shrinking. Buffered RAM is another story, that still seems relevant, and would illustrate the point you are trying to make much better, I think.

My point is that using a product in unintended ways will return unintended results. Sure you can do Baja style racing with a Honda Civic. It will break faster than it would in its normal intended use, normal street driving.

Yes, but you also have to remember, especially as an IT professional, that a *lot* of segregation in the PC hardware market is purely artificial. Remember people buying up Xeons for gaming instead of i5s/i7s? Has anyone complained about that? But it's a SERVER chip! Or what about "workstation" graphics, which are same silicone and different drivers? Do you really think that "enterprise" HDDs are very different from consumer ones, not counting the obviously stupid idea of using a WD Green in RAID and excluding models with actual specs differences such as WD Velociraptor? If so, what are the differences? Do you have any evidence of these differences?

I get it. You have it out for Seagate because the Dell servers you have had Seagates that failed.

You confused me with the other guy. I never mentioned Dell servers... (we don't have any, thank sanity 😀)

I discount any method that tries to utilize a product for unintended purposes, yes. I will not accept any of the data for consumer grade drives in a enterprise grade situation. It is an unrealistic situation for the HDDs and was done improperly as well in the mounting of said HDDs.

Oh, sure, unrealistic. The company I work at just got a new VM from Hetzner yesterday for web hosting and whatnot, and guess what, it's running consumer-grade Seagate drives. Our previous Hetzner VMs all used HGST drives which have behaved excellent, but now I'm worried. The only reason you think this is unrealistic is because you wouldn't do it. But guess what? Where I work, we can't even get enterprise-grade drives because they don't sell them here. I'd love to load up with enterprise- or semi-enterprise-grade HGSTs and WDs simply because of better warranties but they aren't available, so we'll continue using consumer drives for our backup servers, SANs and so on. And guess what? As long as those drives are WD, they work pretty damn good for these purposes. (Except WD Black - those suck! 😀)

 

[jimmysmitty]

So I assume that you have worked on data centers where the information has to be 100% correct then? Most high servers and most company servers require ECC. Most lower end servers, small ones, do not.

But hey, go ahead and argue with years of IT professionals and people who design this stuff for a living.

I did say *most* servers. You want to run anything really critical, go ahead and invest in ECC... as well as double PSUs, failover UPS, generators, every precaution is worth it, but on this list, ECC would be the last thing I'd be worried about (where I work, it's more likely that power will be cut for 6 hours straight - in fact, that happens every week at least once - than a random error in an otherwise healthy DIMM occurs). I'm just sick of people bringing up ECC whenever a word "server" comes up and yes, I will argue because I've also done my research and most IT professionals seem to be in agreement that ECC isn't nearly as relevant as it used to be. RAM has gotten more reliable, less error-prone and easier to troubleshoot over the years. The need for ECC is shrinking. Buffered RAM is another story, that still seems relevant, and would illustrate the point you are trying to make much better, I think.

My point is that using a product in unintended ways will return unintended results. Sure you can do Baja style racing with a Honda Civic. It will break faster than it would in its normal intended use, normal street driving.

Yes, but you also have to remember, especially as an IT professional, that a *lot* of segregation in the PC hardware market is purely artificial. Remember people buying up Xeons for gaming instead of i5s/i7s? Has anyone complained about that? But it's a SERVER chip! Or what about "workstation" graphics, which are same silicone and different drivers? Do you really think that "enterprise" HDDs are very different from consumer ones, not counting the obviously stupid idea of using a WD Green in RAID and excluding models with actual specs differences such as WD Velociraptor? If so, what are the differences? Do you have any evidence of these differences?

I get it. You have it out for Seagate because the Dell servers you have had Seagates that failed.

You confused me with the other guy. I never mentioned Dell servers... (we don't have any, thank sanity 😀)

I discount any method that tries to utilize a product for unintended purposes, yes. I will not accept any of the data for consumer grade drives in a enterprise grade situation. It is an unrealistic situation for the HDDs and was done improperly as well in the mounting of said HDDs.

Oh, sure, unrealistic. The company I work at just got a new VM from Hetzner yesterday for web hosting and whatnot, and guess what, it's running consumer-grade Seagate drives. Our previous Hetzner VMs all used HGST drives which have behaved excellent, but now I'm worried. The only reason you think this is unrealistic is because you wouldn't do it. But guess what? Where I work, we can't even get enterprise-grade drives because they don't sell them here. I'd love to load up with enterprise- or semi-enterprise-grade HGSTs and WDs simply because of better warranties but they aren't available, so we'll continue using consumer drives for our backup servers, SANs and so on. And guess what? As long as those drives are WD, they work pretty damn good for these purposes. (Except WD Black - those suck! 😀)

The only difference between a Xeon and an i7 (or any of them) is support for ECC and a few other server specific features. i5/i7s tend to be better for gaming though because they have a higher stock clock which games prefer. Xeons tend to be clocked a bit lower and are not able to be overclocked. Xeons are also higher binned parts meaning they are designed for 24x7 operations and reliability. Doesn't mean they can't be used for consumer systems but that they are typically better used in servers.

ECC RAM is very important though. We use it because all the data we have has to be right and any chance of data corruption is a risk not worth taking, especially when you deal with lawsuits or fines. In a data heavy server environment you want ECC to ensure that that data does not get written as corrupted and that 7 year old file you now need to prove you are not liable for a couple of million dollar fine is now unreadable.

And there is a difference. Seagates enterprise class drives, the Constellation series, does have features that consumer grade drives do not such a head parking to help keep damage from vibrations.

And I did mix you up. Sorry. I feel bad that you can't get enterprise grade drives. That is pretty bad. I personally don't pick a brand unless I have had experience with them. At a repair shop I worked at had a lot of failures with HGST and Samsung HDDs. However Samsung SSDs are some of the best I have used.

I have been using Seagates for a long time and have yet to have one fail in my personal system, even ones that are old as dirt. Hell my personal systems have not had any failures from even WD.

But again the point of the article is to expose the lawsuit for what it is, a weak argument based around faulty data that cannot be indicative of consumer drive performance or reliability as it is not consumer use scenarios.

 

[tsnor]

All I see is a list of maybes and what ifs of why the Backblaze data might be flawed. Yet, I see ZERO data supporting Seagate to be a reliable brand, specifically the models with horrid failure rates in the Backblaze data. All Seagate has to do is out their own failure rates from datacenters to put Backblaze in their place because it's not like they don't know these numbers. If Seagate had solid data proving the high failure rate models are in fact excellent they would have released it already and they haven't. Backblaze also has consumers backing their 'problem' models with poor ratings at stores.

There is hard evidence that the Backblaze environment is flawed, I even provided you a simple picture of just one reason. Even by the company's own admission the data is not applicable outside its own use case.

By the company's own admission the chassis is flawed - what part of that people do not understand, when they print it in black and white...man, I don't get it.

I did not proclaim that Seagate is more or less reliable than anyone. It is possible they are better, worse, or just the same as some other vendor, but we need real data to quantify who is better or worse - not this.

I agree that the vendors hide data, I call that out all the time, and the few that do release the data I applaud them and even inject any released failure data into articles.

I have publicly denounced the lack of vendor provided field failure rate data, and also publicly applauded the few who do provide it (Intel, OCZ). But, as I have stated before, and will again, I don't believe that we should accept obviously failed data in the absence of good data.

No one wants to see another Google report more than I do. They know how to conduct a study, and actually use screws instead of rubber bands.

I think the public's willingness to embrace the Backblaze data stems from either just misinformation (which its really easy to be informed, just read their blog), or more likely it is just the backlash against the vendor silence on field failure rates. Personally, for those that don't release data, they are probably getting what they deserve. But none of them in the Backblaze list do, so its a culture of silence.

However, the data stickler in me says that I have to point out the flaws. I refuse to copy/paste someone's press release without taking a deeper look. People always want their source of news to look deeper, but sometimes put forth an incredible backlash when an outlet actually takes the time to investigate, as opposed to just copy/pasting hogwash. Go figure.

Sir you write a very reasonable editorial. There is nothing wrong with it. But like other editorials it carries a point of view. An article about a lawsuit should try to provided balanced coverage. Consider the efforts you made to allow the "other side" to express why their stupid, frivolous lawsuit is valid. An article can let readers come to the opinon that a lawsuit is stupid, but it should not be slanted to make the case.

As for the scientific basis of the blackblaze data -- I've yet to see any quotes taken from by Blackblaze in any of their reliablity reports or blog entries that has proven factually inaccurate. Nor do I think it fair to Blackblaze that your article title refers to a ".. Questionable Reliability Report", or that you post things like "...There is hard evidence that the Backblaze environment is flawed..." The Blackblaze environment is designed to store data. What hard evidence do you have that it fails to store data?

 

[George Phillips]

All mechanical drives will fail eventually. The ones that are installed in the environment that amplifies vibration will accelerate the failure tremendously. There were also reviews that test the performance of hard drives under different levels of vibration, and the ones that are installed in a way with the least amount of vibration perform the best. Mechanical things naturally last longer if there is less vibration. Seagate will win this one. The plaintiff and his team of lawyers will probably settled with Seagate that prefers to end this from damaging its reputation if this case keeps going.

 

[xyriin]

Oh look, a real article analyzing the Backblaze data without the slant.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/hgst-hard-disks-still-super-reliable-seagates-have-greatly-improved/

 

[jimmysmitty]

Oh look, a real article analyzing the Backblaze data without the slant.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/hgst-hard-disks-still-super-reliable-seagates-have-greatly-improved/

There is no slant, just that the data being used for the lawsuit is un-usable due to it being consumer drives in an enterprise setting and they are not even mounted properly.

The article is about the class action lawsuit being a frivolous lawsuit.

 

[xyriin]

Oh look, a real article analyzing the Backblaze data without the slant.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/hgst-hard-disks-still-super-reliable-seagates-have-greatly-improved/

There is no slant, just that the data being used for the lawsuit is un-usable due to it being consumer drives in an enterprise setting and they are not even mounted properly.

The article is about the class action lawsuit being a frivolous lawsuit.

The first three paragraphs are legit, the PAGES after are pure slant. The article focuses on not the lawsuit but instead the Backblaze study and why the author doesn't like the study. At the very end a minimal portion of the article attempts to loosely tie the slant to the lawsuit...
"The conditions of the Backblaze failure data, even by the company's own admission, are far beyond the warranty claims of said hardware, which begs the immediate question of whether that data will pass the sniff test in court. I am no lawyer, but it should be relatively easy for Seagate to parry in this case; the results are essentially worthless to measure any practical consumer client application within the warranty guidelines."

This little bit out of the entire article is only part of the author's creation that isn't slant. If you want to cut out the other couple pages, leave that little bit, and change the title I'll call it an article about the lawsuit. Until then slant.

Also, it's obvious Seagate has lawyers, if the Backblaze data was that far out of line they would have been slapped with a defamation lawsuit. But no lawsuit and no countering data because Seagate simply wants this to disappear and they can't prove the problematic models are actually good.

The Ars article was simple an example of responsible reporting.

So are you a super fan of the author, just beating a dead horse because you can't stop, or a Seagate brand fan?

 

[Non-Euclidean]

Whats even funnier is the new BackBlaze report says Seagate is the most reliable (The 4TB ones).

All of the 4TB drives have acceptable failure rates, but we’ve purchased primarily Seagate drives. Why? The HGST 4TB drives, while showing exceptionally low failure rates, are no longer available having been replaced with higher priced, higher performing models. The readily available and highly competitive price of the Seagate 4TB drives, along with their solid performance and respectable failure rates, have made them our drive of choice.

A relevant observation from our Operations team on the Seagate drives is that they generally signal their impending failure via their SMART stats. Since we monitor several SMART stats, we are often warned of trouble before a pending failure and can take appropriate action. Drive failures from the other manufacturers appear to be less predictable via SMART stats.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q4-2015/

Good luck getting around that in court!

 

[jimmysmitty]

Oh look, a real article analyzing the Backblaze data without the slant.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/hgst-hard-disks-still-super-reliable-seagates-have-greatly-improved/

There is no slant, just that the data being used for the lawsuit is un-usable due to it being consumer drives in an enterprise setting and they are not even mounted properly.

The article is about the class action lawsuit being a frivolous lawsuit.

The first three paragraphs are legit, the PAGES after are pure slant. The article focuses on not the lawsuit but instead the Backblaze study and why the author doesn't like the study. At the very end a minimal portion of the article attempts to loosely tie the slant to the lawsuit...
"The conditions of the Backblaze failure data, even by the company's own admission, are far beyond the warranty claims of said hardware, which begs the immediate question of whether that data will pass the sniff test in court. I am no lawyer, but it should be relatively easy for Seagate to parry in this case; the results are essentially worthless to measure any practical consumer client application within the warranty guidelines."

This little bit out of the entire article is only part of the author's creation that isn't slant. If you want to cut out the other couple pages, leave that little bit, and change the title I'll call it an article about the lawsuit. Until then slant.

Also, it's obvious Seagate has lawyers, if the Backblaze data was that far out of line they would have been slapped with a defamation lawsuit. But no lawsuit and no countering data because Seagate simply wants this to disappear and they can't prove the problematic models are actually good.

The Ars article was simple an example of responsible reporting.

So are you a super fan of the author, just beating a dead horse because you can't stop, or a Seagate brand fan?

I am specifically against frivolous lawsuits that use non-applicable data. You cannot use data when the data is flawed. The Backblaze data is flawed. They used consumer grade devices in an enterprise setting. They didn't mount the properly. The drives are not rated for 24x7 applications.

I would be the same with WD, Seagate or any other brand because using a product in an environment it was not design for or beyond its specified running parameters is flawed data.

So sure, you can call me a fanboy if you want although I have used pretty much every brand of drive and have multiple brands in my home PCs. There is only one WD I think is worthless, that is the Raptor line due to SSDs now, but other than that I am fine with WDs.

Or you could take what I am saying and try to comprehend how stupid the lawsuit is because it truly is a stupid lawsuit.

 

[xyriin]

I am specifically against frivolous lawsuits that use non-applicable data. You cannot use data when the data is flawed. The Backblaze data is flawed. They used consumer grade devices in an enterprise setting. They didn't mount the properly. The drives are not rated for 24x7 applications.

I would be the same with WD, Seagate or any other brand because using a product in an environment it was not design for or beyond its specified running parameters is flawed data.

So sure, you can call me a fanboy if you want although I have used pretty much every brand of drive and have multiple brands in my home PCs. There is only one WD I think is worthless, that is the Raptor line due to SSDs now, but other than that I am fine with WDs.

Or you could take what I am saying and try to comprehend how stupid the lawsuit is because it truly is a stupid lawsuit.

Except we know for a fact that certain Seagate models in the 1.5-3TB range are horrible. This might be the only way to force Seagate's hand into showing internal failure rates of their problematic drives. I have no problem with a consumer fighting a company for shipping and continuing to sell a known bad product all for the sake of making a buck.

Are you seriously calling a lawsuit stupid if it involves a consumer fighting a huge corporation with a bad product? This is why class action lawsuits exist because an individual can never win against the big company. It is literally the ONLY recourse. As it stands right now you're advocating for Seagate to get a 100% pass on shipping known bad drives. That's kind of like saying "Hey, lets not even try this murder suspect in court because the evidence is circumstantial, we'll just release him". The whole POINT of the legal system is to prove innocence or guilt, not sentence the pre-determined guilty.

Hopefully the judge takes the Backblaze data and requires Seagate to provide data in order to get the Backblaze data thrown out.

 

[jimmysmitty]

I am specifically against frivolous lawsuits that use non-applicable data. You cannot use data when the data is flawed. The Backblaze data is flawed. They used consumer grade devices in an enterprise setting. They didn't mount the properly. The drives are not rated for 24x7 applications.

I would be the same with WD, Seagate or any other brand because using a product in an environment it was not design for or beyond its specified running parameters is flawed data.

So sure, you can call me a fanboy if you want although I have used pretty much every brand of drive and have multiple brands in my home PCs. There is only one WD I think is worthless, that is the Raptor line due to SSDs now, but other than that I am fine with WDs.

Or you could take what I am saying and try to comprehend how stupid the lawsuit is because it truly is a stupid lawsuit.

Except we know for a fact that certain Seagate models in the 1.5-3TB range are horrible. This might be the only way to force Seagate's hand into showing internal failure rates of their problematic drives. I have no problem with a consumer fighting a company for shipping and continuing to sell a known bad product all for the sake of making a buck.

Are you seriously calling a lawsuit stupid if it involves a consumer fighting a huge corporation with a bad product? This is why class action lawsuits exist because an individual can never win against the big company. It is literally the ONLY recourse. As it stands right now you're advocating for Seagate to get a 100% pass on shipping known bad drives. That's kind of like saying "Hey, lets not even try this murder suspect in court because the evidence is circumstantial, we'll just release him". The whole POINT of the legal system is to prove innocence or guilt, not sentence the pre-determined guilty.

Hopefully the judge takes the Backblaze data and requires Seagate to provide data in order to get the Backblaze data thrown out.

The guy is not suing to protect the little guy nor are the lawyers. They are suing to get a pay day. That is why they are using the Backblaze data.

As I said, the use of the Backblaze data in anything other than the fact that using consumer drives in a enterprise ecosystem is not a good idea.

 

[John Kristian]

I bought 17 of these drives (ST3000DM001) and all of them failed. After I received new drives that still continued to fail, I ended up tossing them. Piece of *MOD Edit* drives.
Bought new WD drives, and they have been running without flaws, but it was an expensive experience. Never buying Seagate again. They can burn in hell.

 

[jimmysmitty]

I bought 17 of these drives (ST3000DM001) and all of them failed. After I received new drives that still continued to fail, I ended up tossing them. Piece of *MOD Edit* drives.
Bought new WD drives, and they have been running without flaws, but it was an expensive experience. Never buying Seagate again. They can burn in hell.

Watch the language please.

And I am not calling you a liar but 17 drives in a row or more including RMAs? That is impossible. A 100% failure rate would indicate something else was going on.

Some drives do fail more than others, especially ones with newer technologies but I have never seen any line of drives fail 100%.

 

[suspicious gamer]

My 3TB died and is the exact model of these drives. All I want is for Seagate to cover the cost of recovering my data. And all the data of everyone affected by this issue.

 

[Johnpombrio]

Working as an HP on site test and measurement repair guy for 25 years, I found that two things kills electronics: Heat and vibration. Looking at the server hard drive cage in the photo and I cringed. I don't care what drives are in it, it is a bad way to run hard drives, no matter what flavor. Any failure here could be something as simple as a solder connection to one of the SATA pins cracking due to vibration and nothing to do with the platters. Or heat may cause premature failures with such close spacing. No, this is not an environment I would trust to show "reliability" stats on a drive that I would install and run very differently.
I have 9 Seagate 3 TB drives without a single failure since they first came out. T'hel with what others find, I will continue to buy what has worked well for me.

 

[John Kristian]

I bought 17 of these (ST3000DM001), and they -all- died. Piece of *MOD EDIT* drives.

 

[jimmysmitty]

I bought 17 of these (ST3000DM001), and they -all- died. Piece of *MOD EDIT* drives.

Seriously? Can't take a hint the first time?

And again, I highly doubt you had 17 drives all die. There is no way to have that bad luck and all drives die.

 

[Ubrales]

I bought 17 of these (ST3000DM001), and they -all- died. Piece of *MOD EDIT* drives.

Seriously? Can't take a hint the first time?

And again, I highly doubt you had 17 drives all die. There is no way to have that bad luck and all drives die.

Might be due to one weak (or bad) component on the high speed automated production line. Sometimes hundreds slip through and get shipped before things are corrected. No one bothers about recalls because of CYA.

Sometimes the Supply Chain Management (Purchasing dept.) decides to do some of their own component cost reductions without knowing what they are getting into.

 

[jimmysmitty]

I bought 17 of these (ST3000DM001), and they -all- died. Piece of *MOD EDIT* drives.

Seriously? Can't take a hint the first time?

And again, I highly doubt you had 17 drives all die. There is no way to have that bad luck and all drives die.

Might be due to one weak (or bad) component on the high speed automated production line. Sometimes hundreds slip through and get shipped before things are corrected. No one bothers about recalls because of CYA.

Sometimes the Supply Chain Management (Purchasing dept.) decides to do some of their own component cost reductions without knowing what they are getting into.

The odds of one person getting that many in a row defective are infintismal though. So many are produced and not all from a single production line go to the same location.

For example, When Intel started producing the G0 stepping of their Q6600 CPU they still had B3s being manufactured and shipped to stores and eTailers so ordering online was a shot in the dark since they were not shipping G0 stepping Q6600s to only one area.

The same applies for the HDDs. If there was a defect in the line they would have been shipped to many areas and the odds of any one person getting all defective drives is near 0.

 

[josejones]

What are we suppose to do if we just bought a couple of these about 6 months ago? do we have an option for a return or what? Who do we contact?

 

[JackNaylorPE]

I bought 17 of these drives (ST3000DM001) and all of them failed. After I received new drives that still continued to fail, I ended up tossing them. Piece of *MOD Edit* drives.
Bought new WD drives, and they have been running without flaws, but it was an expensive experience. Never buying Seagate again. They can burn in hell.

Good idea replacing them with the drives that actually have the highest failure rate on the market... 2.25 times the rate of three Seagates you replaced

- http://www.hardware.fr/articles/927-6/disques-durs.html

3TB

- 4,24% WD Black WD3001FAEX
- 3,83% WD SE WD3000F9YZ
- 2,39% Toshiba DT01ACA300
- 1,89% Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 ST3000DM001

4TB:

- 4,76% WD Black WD4001FAEX
- 1,95% WD RE WD4000FYYZ
- 1,87% Seagate NAS ST4000VN000

Also if you look at the historical return rate of 3TB and 4TB drives, they are substantially higher than 2 TB ... it's gotten better but still high ... latest numbers below:

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/934-6/disques-durs.html

- 3,40% Toshiba DT01ACA300
- 2,78% WD SE WD3000F9YZ
- 1,49% WD Red WD30EFRX
- 1,36% Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 ST3000DM001

- 2,93% WD Green WD40EZRX
- 1,45% WD Red WD40EFRX
- 1,18% WD Black WD4003FZEX
- 1,08% Seagate NAS HDD ST4000VN000

 

[bloodroses75]

My 3tb Seagate external (the one on the list) just died a few months back; destroying all the data. My 2tb Seagate internal (which was holding the data that the backed up drive was 'backing up') just died less than a week ago. The only other Seagate drive I've ever owned has been used for maybe an hour max; I'm afraid it will die prematurely as well. It's too bad they need so much information from the customer to be able to file with this lawsuit.
Needless to say, I will never use a Seagate again and am now awaiting my new Toshiba drive to come in.

 

[cats_Paw]

I burned 5 seagates in under 2 years. After that, I switched to samsung. So far, all still work.
I have a lot of friends who think seagate and western digital are good brands for hard drives and even if they die early, people assume its their fault.

Its good to see that word is getting around about this problem as those companies should be driven out of the market by now.