Seagate Hit with Class Action Lawsuit over High HDD Failure Rates

ERazer · Feb 2, 2016

funny never had problems with seagate, prolly lucky :laugh:

Batou1986 · Feb 2, 2016

Confirming what I already knew

Jism · Feb 2, 2016

Ubersonic said:
Erm, so the lawsuit has no actual evidence/data to support it then? lol.

Backblaze are a bargain basement data storage company, they build file servers out of consumer HDDs and pack them into densely populated homemade enclosures that starve them of air and run ridiculously hot, their data on failure rates is no more relevant to the consumer than McLarens failure rate of Honda engines in Formula one.

All their data shows is that Seagate's consumer drives are more likely to die if subjected to stupid levels of torture which are completely incomparable to consumer usage.

Cool story, but i dont think this is true. I used to run seagate for a pretty amount of years and i can tell you the following things.

- They fail for no reason, i.e firmware broken, PCB damaged
- Always kept under low temperature conditions (less then 40 degrees operation and still failing)

I had a small business going with HDD recovery. Guess what the highest amount of disks purely by brand where? Seagate. For no reason a corrupt firmware in 8 out of 10 occasions. Sometimes a burned PCB or in worst case serious damage to heads / platter / disk itself.

Conclusion: to my opinion seagate used to produce quality drives, but the last couple of years (< 8 ) they are producing discs that have an high unusual outtage.

Yes warranty and all is included whenever a disk fails, but recovery services from seagate still costs money. And the hassle you have to get your data back...

lately i've bin buying samsung HDD's for storage. Some of them are older then 4 years and still happily running. There are better HDD manufacturers out there and seagate does not belong anymore to that.

Rowsol · Feb 2, 2016

newtekie1 said:
A better source of failure rates is this. They actually track consumer return rates. And the reality is they are pretty close together.

Thanks for the link! Interesting, it shows Seagate with the least amount of returns.

PP Mguire · Feb 2, 2016

Since 2014 I've been buying HGST but I have 12 Seagate drives that still run 24/7 without issue. The Backblaze article is bullshit and several tech sites have proved why. Little Google shows this.
I even have one of the famous 1.5TB 7200.11 drives and it works.

FordGT90Concept · Feb 2, 2016

I haven't really noticed a high failure rate from any brand. Granted, I keep my HDDs well ventilated.

myworldoftech · Feb 2, 2016

I just had a 3TB seagate fail on me a few days ago. At work most of the 3TB Seagates have failed or developed bad sectors in under a year. There is a reason drives are now being spec'd for "desktop" use and not 24/7. Limited poh and limited writes even.

The 4TB seem to be better from what ive read online. I have a few of those (knock on wood). I will get rid of all my Seagate 3TB in my File Server and just keep as emergency drives now.

It could be just that model. But then Seagate has a history of particular models with serious to critical issues. Maybe a firmware update could help.

On the other hand I have 3 Barracuda LP 2TB which I used for a year then applied a firmware update to it and they are all still going strong after 8+ years. Granted I only power it up to get data now.

Its all about money. Why make a drive that lasts forever like the good ole days. Planned obsolesence I say!

bubbly1724 · Feb 2, 2016

Guess WD will be sued next?

Squuiid · Feb 2, 2016

Jack1n said:
I actually found WD to be most reliable, followed by Hitachi and with Seagate being the absolutely worst.

+1
Spot on.

johnspack · Feb 3, 2016

Think most of us already knew this... why I don't have 3tb Seagates.....

FordGT90Concept · Feb 3, 2016

I have two, neither have failed.

johnspack · Feb 3, 2016

I'll pray for you! Seriously, just buy a Toshiba ect next time... reduces stress....

Jetster · Feb 3, 2016

I had three 3tb drives. No issues. But I sell my drives every three to four years

johnspack · Feb 3, 2016

I tend to run them until they die... I just threw out 3 Seagate 320gig drives that ran for 9 years in several of my boxes. I'm hoping there newer drives are better... who knows. But I'm not taking the chance with any of my newer drives.

R-T-B · Feb 3, 2016

johnspack said:
I tend to run them until they die... I just threw out 3 Seagate 320gig drives that ran for 9 years in several of my boxes. I'm hoping there newer drives are better... who knows. But I'm not taking the chance with any of my newer drives.

9 years isn't bad at all man.

johnspack · Feb 3, 2016

Heh, nope, not at all....

rtwjunkie · Feb 3, 2016

This is obviously not a Seagate fan post, because look at my specs: WD. But this lawsuit is utter bunk. They are pointing to the Backblaze testing. We had a whole thread on them last year in here, and it's not a "cool story." They actually are running their servers on consumer HDD of all types that are being run under conditions they were never designed to run, because their asses are too cheap to buy enterprise drives designed for the job.

Seagate is being given a bad rap here. They've never been my preference, but it's just a personal thing. I don't believe them to be any better or worse than WD.

EarthDog · Feb 3, 2016

Ubersonic said:
It's not really that simple, the numbers don't lie but the context does. To use a hypothetical example, imagine two watches, one can survive being submerged in water to 50 feet, the other can survive being submerged in water to 50,000 feet, that means if they are used by divers then the will be a big disparity in the failure rate, however if they are used normally by the general public then nobody will see a real difference.

That's effectively the situation here, all the drives are consumer level drives yet they are being subjected to a ridiculous amount of abuse, far beyond what any enterprise drive would normally be subjected to. The extra failure rate of the Seagate drives is irrelevant because it's not a situation any of the drives will ever encounter, it's an artificial situation created by Backblazes greed.

Thanks isn't enough...

QFT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

PP Mguire · Feb 3, 2016

Forgot to add, they've been known to use refurb drives too.

Haytch · Feb 4, 2016

Currently running 23x 2Tb Samsung drives since 2007. Never had a problem with any of them.

All Seagate and WD drives i have purchased since 2005 have failed including 4x Seagate 8Tb Archive drives.
All drives are read only once they have been filled up and are accessed on average 10 times a day.
I am still running a single WD drive from 2014, which is pretty much close to death.

All Seagate and WD external drives ever puchased by myself or a customer ended up being a refurbished drive. In most cases of 2Tb external drives, it was a failed 3Tb drive slapped into an enclosure and marked as 2Tb.

Back in the day, when WD got flooded and the prices went up, the boss decided to purchase as many external drives that were still being sold by retailers such as Officeworks at their lowest price around Australia, remove the enclosures and sell them as internal drives for customers computer systems. Every single drive ended up being a refurbished drive, around 10,000+ units.

My current brand of choice is Hitachi, but my advice is to ALWAYS have a backup of your important data regardless of brand.

Patriot · Feb 4, 2016

bubbly1724 said:
Guess WD will be sued next?

iirc that is just the raw numbers... Seagate numbers went down because they didn't replace the failed seagate drivers with seagates... and the WD drives are older and gradually starting to fail...
Hitachi isn't made since they were bought by WD... so those are 2010 drives...
HGST weren't being bought because they are expensive... small samples size on those.

Toshiba has the tools from hitachi due to WD purchase of hitachi.
I tend to buy toshiba, every seagate drive I have bought has died... ever WD red drive I have bought has died.

Patriot · Feb 4, 2016

rtwjunkie said:
This is obviously not a Seagate fan post, because look at my specs: WD. But this lawsuit is utter bunk. They are pointing to the Backblaze testing. We had a whole thread on them last year in here, and it's not a "cool story." They actually are running their servers on consumer HDD of all types that are being run under conditions they were never designed to run, because their asses are too cheap to buy enterprise drives designed for the job.

Seagate is being given a bad rap here. They've never been my preference, but it's just a personal thing. I don't believe them to be any better or worse than WD.

It is just an uninformed post. Most enterprise customers.... don't pay for enterprise drives SMB do.
Doesn't change the fact that seagate drives are fragile. WD green/red are shit.

The volume requirements of the industry require cheaper drives where failure is the norm.

newtekie1 · Feb 4, 2016

Patriot said:
iirc that is just the raw numbers...

Look at the left side of the graph, it is failure percentage, not raw numbers. The Seagate numbers went down because they stopped buying the models they found out had problems with their RAID controllers.

rtwjunkie said:
They actually are running their servers on consumer HDD of all types that are being run under conditions they were never designed to run, because their asses are too cheap to buy enterprise drives designed for the job.

Plus what they call a failure isn't actually the drive failing, it is just the RAID controller saying the drive is failed. The drive could still be perfectly functional.

rtwjunkie · Feb 4, 2016

Patriot said:
It is just an uninformed post. Most enterprise customers.... don't pay for enterprise drives SMB do.
Doesn't change the fact that seagate drives are fragile. WD green/red are shit.

Uninformed, huh? :rolleyes:

I suggest you look into the stories that have been done on their use of anything available. There are a number of them. Backblaze's method of supplying drives to their servers is way outside the norm.

I'll leave some of it up. The Backblaze story is real. They even admitted to the internal report which leaked. What is questionable is there are no set testing standards to do a study. This is outlined quite well here:
http://www.enterprisestorageforum.c...ng-a-disk-drive-how-not-to-do-research-1.html
And for a well-written synopsis:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/17/backblaze_how_not_to_evaluate_disk_reliability/
And even Tom's has a good evaluation of the lawsuit and then deeper background into the Backblaze figures in relation to it:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-hdd-failure-lawsuit-3tb,31118.html
Tweaktown's teardown of their methods, which show the results mean nothing:
http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/6...bility-myth-the-real-story-covered/index.html

I agree Greens are fragile, if not used properly. Used in an external drive, which is not constantly accessed, ie used for storage, I have had great success with them. That is the ideal situation for their idle down. The problems with Greens most people have is they are constantly accessing them, which is usually right after it idled down, since it's a short time period for it to do so. This causes the load/unload count to rise abnormally.

My experience with Reds though is completely different than yours. I've got 9 Reds in my home server that run 24/7, and have been for over 3 years straight. Yes, they are coming up on their max hours, but otherwise, not a thing is wrong with them.

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Seagate Hit with Class Action Lawsuit over High HDD Failure Rates

ERazer

Batou1986

Jism

Rowsol

PP Mguire

FordGT90Concept

"I go fast!1!11!1!"

myworldoftech

bubbly1724

Squuiid

johnspack

Here For Good!

FordGT90Concept

"I go fast!1!11!1!"

johnspack

Here For Good!

Jetster

johnspack

Here For Good!

R-T-B

johnspack

Here For Good!

rtwjunkie

PC Gaming Enthusiast

EarthDog

PP Mguire

Haytch

Patriot

Patriot

newtekie1

Semi-Retired Folder

rtwjunkie

PC Gaming Enthusiast

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