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News Seagate hit by lawsuit over faulty 3TB hard drives

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by Gareth Halfacree, 2 Feb 2016.

  1. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Gareth Halfacree, 2 Feb 2016
    #1
  2. Cthippo

    Cthippo Can't mod my way out of a paper bag

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    Well, crap.

    Guess I'll have to get something different for my fileserver then. These are the cheapest 3 TB drives in the market and I guess you get what you pay for.
     
    Cthippo, 3 Feb 2016
    #2
  3. azrael-

    azrael- I'm special...

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    I wouldn't touch Seagate drives voluntarily unless my life depended on it. Perhaps not even then.

    Seagate make the only drives I personally have ever seen fail. The last incident was a couple of weeks ago at work. Luckily the drive was part of a RAID array, so the data could be reconstructed relatively painlessly.
     
    azrael-, 3 Feb 2016
    #3
  4. Atomic

    Atomic Gerwaff

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    You're lucky you didn't have any of the old IBM DeskStar drives, those were notorious for failing!
     
    Atomic, 3 Feb 2016
    #4
  5. Mr_Mistoffelees

    Mr_Mistoffelees The Bit-Tech Cat. New Improved Version.

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    So the class action is really just a money making exercise for the legal firm.
     
    Mr_Mistoffelees, 3 Feb 2016
    #5
  6. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Depends: is your day job really just a money making exercise for you? No judgement if it is, of course.
     
    Gareth Halfacree, 3 Feb 2016
    #6
  7. Mr_Mistoffelees

    Mr_Mistoffelees The Bit-Tech Cat. New Improved Version.

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    My point is that they will be the only ones to really benefit, not the claimants who lost out when the drives failed.
     
    Mr_Mistoffelees, 3 Feb 2016
    #7
  8. creative

    creative 500rwhp

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    Im the opposite. I only run seagate drives now as I have had zero issue with them.... WD on the other hand is the brand I wouldnt touch anymore. Every single one of their drives has failed on me including friends external units.
     
    creative, 3 Feb 2016
    #8
  9. Vallachia

    Vallachia What's a Dremel?

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    I use Seagate or Hitachi nowadays. I've had zero issues with my Seagate 320GB, 1TB, 2TB and 4TB drives. The 320's are ten years old and all five of them work perfectly, no bad sectors either.

    On the other hand, I've got a pile of WD greens that all died just outside the warranty period. I'd probably be quite happy with WD black or RE drives, but they are too expensive. Would not touch the WD green or red (green with slightly diff. firmware) drives ever again.
     
    Vallachia, 4 Feb 2016
    #9
  10. Paradigm Shifter

    Paradigm Shifter de nihilo nihil fit

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    I've had a couple of Seagate drives go bad on me, but I've always had time to get data off first. WD, on the other hand... I've had five WD drives die without any notice whatsoever in the last two years. I'm never buying them again.
     
    Paradigm Shifter, 4 Feb 2016
    #10
  11. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Depends on your perspective. The class will likely receive *something* - payouts in cases like this range from a few pence to a surprising chunk of the drive cost, depending on factors like how hard the company fights the case and how big the class turns out to be - but that's really only a secondary concern: the important part of such suits is to stop the company doing it again.

    Let's say Seagate is genuinely at fault here: it knew there was a defect in its 3TB drives, and sold 'em anyway. If it gets away with no more than a bit of quickly-forgotten bad publicity, that might tempt it into taking the same gamble with a faulty model in the future - which is bad for consumers.

    Alternatively, Seagate gets sued, loses, and has to pay - for the sake of argument - $400 million in compensation. Even if the lawyers get 100% of that money and the class gets nothing, it can be argued that the class - indeed, consumers as a whole - has benefited because Seagate now has a very sound financial reason to not do that ever again. Better still, such a ruling would likely come with the demand that Seagate stops selling the faulty drives altogether - another win for the consumer that doesn't read tech sites and just grabs the first 3TB drive they see on the shelves.

    To put it another way: is imprisoning someone who burgled you a bad thing if you still don't get any of your stuff back?
     
    Gareth Halfacree, 4 Feb 2016
    #11
  12. impar

    impar Minimodder

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    impar, 4 Feb 2016
    #12
  13. Cthippo

    Cthippo Can't mod my way out of a paper bag

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    Hey Impar, haven't seen you around much recently.
     
    Cthippo, 4 Feb 2016
    #13
  14. Unicorn

    Unicorn Uniform November India

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    A million times this. Over the past few months I have installed ~100TB of hard disk storage in RAID arrays, NAS devices and servers (a lot of it my own) and there wasn't a Seagate drive in sight. Every megabyte of data that I hold dear is stored and backed up on Western Digital and Hitachi disks.

    You weren't a victim of the great WD Caviar Green failure period then, when their 1TB and 2TB drives were failing left, right and centre? I lost 5 or 6 of them over a period of 2 years, but they were in arrays with redundancy, and I make both on-site and off-site backups.
     
    Unicorn, 4 Feb 2016
    #14
  15. impar

    impar Minimodder

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    Greetings!
    New jobs, less free time. Still visit the forum, though, just dont post often.

    From the same link I posted above:
    [​IMG]
    :eeek:

    And guess who has one of those ST3000DM001... :sigh:
     
    impar, 4 Feb 2016
    #15
  16. Unicorn

    Unicorn Uniform November India

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    One of my photographer clients had her entire digital workflow "backed up" on one of those until recently. When I say she thought she had it backed up, I mean that instead of copying the data from her SSD RAID array, she was moving it to the Seagate mechanical disk! :eeek: It's been remedied now though, I recently installed a Drobo 5N with WD Reds in her studio (seperate building from the house where her editing suite/office is) and set up both incremental daily backups and weekly boot disc image backups.
     
    Unicorn, 4 Feb 2016
    #16
  17. impar

    impar Minimodder

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    impar, 17 Feb 2016
    #17
  18. Paradigm Shifter

    Paradigm Shifter de nihilo nihil fit

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    Last time I checked, Hitachi only makes expensive drives now. You get what you pay for.

    I decided to test out some of Seagate's Constellation class Enterprise drives (sounds like an episode of Star Trek or something...) but haven't had them running long enough to really know if they're going to do anything crazy. I had one that was 'bad on arrival' (threw up thousands of errors during bad sector testing) and was replaced immediately. I have everything that is on them elsewhere as well, but I really need a third backup... (ie: have everything in four places...)

    The failure rate for WDC drives in that link is pretty scary as well.
     
    Paradigm Shifter, 17 Feb 2016
    #18
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