Seagate sued over 3TB HDD failure

A class action lawsuit has been filed against Seagate in Canada. The case concerns the Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 HDDs with a storage capacity of 3TB, which would systematically fail. This was previously revealed by research by storage company BackBlaze.

Seagate is being sued by Hagens Berman, which is filing class action lawsuits against large companies in the name of consumers. Attorney Steve Berman told DigitalTrends that Seagate has delivered a product that does not live up to expectations and that Seagate should give customers their money back. According to the office, the manufacturer has promised to repair or replace HDDs, but customers have received broken drives or experienced failures again.

In early 2015, cloud provider BackBlaze announced that 43 percent of Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 series 3TB HDDs were failing. The company based itself on 1163 HDDs that it had in use in its data centers. The lawsuit against Seagate concerns the HDD with type number ST3000DM001, which has been sold since 2011, and the Seagate Backup Plus 3TB, an external hard drive.

The indictment states that the lawyers frequently refer to the BackBlaze report. Whether that report is valid evidence of the unreliability of the Seagate drives remains to be seen. The HDDs in question were intended for the consumer market, while BackBlaze deploys them in data centers. This is not unusual, by the way, and the company did the same with HDDs from many other brands, where the failure rate was less high.

Furthermore, the indictment contains a number of experiences from consumers who have joined the case and references to user reviews on newegg.com. The plaintiffs not only want Seagate to refund the money for the defective HDDs, but also demand compensation for any damages users may have suffered as a result of data loss. Hagens Berman has filed the charges with the Canadian court and now wants a jury to consider it. Whether and when that will happen is not yet known.