Seagate Faces Class Action Lawsuit For Defective 3TB Internal And External HDDs

If you own or have owned a 3TB hard drive from Seagate, the law firm behind a suit against the company wants to hear from you. At the case page, it's mentioned that three Seagate models are involved here, including the standard desktop version (called Barracuda), the Backup Plus external version, or any other that includes the model number "ST3000DM001."

The suit alleges that these 3TB Seagate drives have a failure rate that's far worse than what's advertised. "Consumers report them failing as an unprecedented rate - sometimes even days after their first use," the law firm writes. Making matters worse, it's said that after people lost data with these bunk drives, the replacement they were given were also defective.

The fact that these 3TB drives are not too reliable was brought to light a couple of years ago by cloud storage provider BackBlaze. The company found that Seagate's 3TB drives failed far more often than either Hitachi's or WD's. Ultimately, the failure rate was about 10%, whereas for WD, it was just over 3%. When dealing with hundreds or even thousands of drives, that's a major difference.

In that same report, it was found that Seagate's 1.5TB drives were also unreliable, with a failure rate of about 14%. Those drives in particular have had a bit of a storied history. Way back in 2008, the company had to release a fix to make its 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 drive work properly in OS X and Linux. A bizarre issue, but another one that Seagate had to deal with.

If you're wanting to participate in this suit against Seagate, prepare to fill out a rather large form. If the law firm deems you worthy of participating, you'll be contacted at some point in the near-future.

Have you had bad luck with any one of Seagate's 3TB drives?