Seagate is a name that many associate with hard drives, and they have a pretty good reputation too, or at least until recently where customers who bought the 1.5TB and 3TB models were shocked to discovered that these drives had an insanely high fail rate. Some reports even claim that they barely make it through a single day’s use.
Sounds pretty crazy, doesn’t it? So much so that Seagate has recently been hit with a class action lawsuit in which the plaintiffs allege that the company had failed to live up to the promises laid out in the warranty. It seems that customers who had sent in their failed hard drives, were then sent replacements of hard drives that were equally prone to failure, essentially meaning that nothing changed.
As to how often did these drives fail? A test conducted by Backblaze found that out of all the 1.5GB models they tested, 13.5% of them failed way before the MTBF. The 3TB model fared a little better at 10%. We suppose if you look at the numbers, it means that almost 90% of Seagate customers had perfectly fine working hard drives.
However at the same time, we reckon that this percentage of failures is definitely higher than Seagate is comfortable with. For those interested in checking out the case, you can head on over to Hagens Berman and Sheller’s website for the details.