lightcatcher Loc: Farmington, NM (4 corners)

Seagate Faces Class Action Lawsuit Over Extremely High Hard Drive Failure Rate

http://www.slrlounge.com/seagate-faces-class-action-lawsuit-hard-drive-failure/?utm_source=SLR+Lounges+News+and+Downloads&utm_campaign=1a6ca3cee5-Newsletter_92b10_8_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c60190ad3d-1a6ca3cee5-414015497&mc_cid=1a6ca3cee5&mc_eid=46273a42fd

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

And it's well-deserved. No question that Seagate Barracudas have recently had terrible reliability. It's not the first time. Years ago the SCSI Barracuda 7 had millions of failures generating a huge recall. Prior to that, Seagate made some of the fastest drives around and were the drive of choice for performance - sadly no more.

Western Digital's hundred-dollar drives don't have a stellar record either, but nowhere as bad as Seagate.

As of today, HGST seems to have the best reliability of the available consumer drives. Backblaze regularly produces a report of the drive reliability in their data center(s). This year the sample size was >47,000 drives ( a pretty good sample ), and HGST was by far the clear winner:

http://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-for-q2-2015.

lightcatcher Loc: Farmington, NM (4 corners)

Some great info thanks for your time and share of info. :thumbup: :thumbup:

johneccles Loc: Leyland UK

This the third time I have see a post about Seagate HDD, if you read the full article you will find that the problem only applies to capacities of 2TB and over. I have had 3 1TB and 1 500gb drives for over three years now and none have failed (yet).

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Unfortunately no. If you check the above-referenced study, you'll note that the 1.5TB Seagate 7200.11 failed at 23.90%. I'm sure that like you, there are many Seagate users who haven't suffered drive failures, but overall, the failure rate for their 7200 series Barracudas is abysmal - it's been over 20% since 2013. It's somewhat model-specific. Note that the 1.5TB LP has a failure rate of ~10% and the 4 & 6TB models vary from 1.7 to 3.8%. In contrast, the HGSTs tested varied from 0.5% to 1.9% depending on model.

BTW, I have nothing against Seagate. I recently pulled Two 20 year-old Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM 4GB (yes, that's GB, not TB) SCSI drives and one 1GB Seagate Hawk out of a drawer, and all spun up and worked! BUT, those were enterprise-class drives that cost about $300 each in the mid 90s. I also had a NetApp NAS running in my basement with 16 4GB Fujitsu drives running for over 10 years without a single drive failure despite less than optimum environmental conditions; but once again, there were full sized enterprise class drives. I've had similar experience with IBM SCSI UltraStars before their drive division was sold. My point is that modern spinning disks are a marvel of cost per capacity, but there's a price to be paid in terms on longevity/reliability when you purchase 4TB capacity for a hundred dollars.

My complaint with Seagate, and perhaps the reason for the class action suit, is that the problem with the 7200 series has persisted for so long. Any company can have a bad run of drives, but this has been going on for 3 years now. For my part, I'm moving to high quality (Intel) SSDs as fast as I can afford it. Unfortunately, even with the recent price cuts, SSDs are still pretty expensive if you need 5-10TB of storage, as many pros do.

johneccles Loc: Leyland UK

Hi Trix, thanks for your comments but if I have to consider buying another hard drive, due to the possible problem with Seagate I would seriously consider the other alternative manufacturers.