Class Action Lawsuit against Seagate

[Skirge01]

I think we all (myself included) should be a little more specific as to what models of drives we're talking about. As others have already pointed out (and Backblaze data seems to support), recent Seagate models have shown drastic improvements over the formerly high rate of failures. For me, the Seagates which failed were ALL ST3000DM001 drives, which were probably the 2nd worst drives ever released (after the infamous Deathstar drives).

[KryptoNyte]

I have (2) of the ST3000DM001 in RAID-0 without issue. It's been 3 or 4 years of 24/7 operation. All of my internal hard drives were originally purchased as external USB drives and then pulled out of the enclosures - at the time, it was the cheapest way to purchase internal hard drives. I have a couple more of the same drives still in their external enclosures that work fine, but they really don't run much.

[waynedunham]

Originally Posted by panteragstk

Isn't HGST owned by WD now?

I've had more WD drives fail on me than my Seageates. I read that the newer Seagates should be among the best. I've got 6 of them with no issues (one DOA due to shipping, but that isn't the manufacturer's fault).

I've seen failures on all manufacturers. I can't really tell who has lower rates and who doesn't.

The seagate 8tb archive drives are going to be my next purchase for a new unRAID build. Maybe I should ponder on that for a bit before my purchase.

I've been running HD's in my various systems for a long time (well over 25 years) and have had issues with all drive manufacturers that I've used. I must say however that Seagates have been the ones with the highest failure rates for me personally.
I used to love Maxtor's back before they turned to junk after Seagate bought them out.
Now almost everything I own (except for devices that came with a different manufacturer in them) is WD. All my SageTV stuff is running off WD Blacks which I have never had a failure on. 6 or 7 of them running 24/7/365 for over 5 years for a few of them.
I just replaced the drives in my main SageTV system last year. Not because of any issues with the drives, I just needed more room and found a great sale on 2TB WD Blacks to replace the 1TB WD Blacks in the system. They were just shy of 6 years old and still chugging away with no problems.

Over the years I've had the old Seagates with the stiction problem where you had to "thump" them to get the drives to spin up when they were cold and multiple failures of what *I* would call medium life (3-5 yrs) drives.
For my $$ Seagate's quality control is just not worthy of my trust.

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by waynedunham

I must say however that Seagates have been the ones with the highest failure rates for me personally.

Which model(s)?

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

Which model(s)?

Here are the models of all of the drives that I have had fail from all manufacturers. Note some of them do not have a model because I couldn't find the model number in my records - may not have kept them. Haven't always recorded them.

Maxtor: 200MB IDE drive

Seagate: ~200GB, ST31000340AS, ST2000DL003, ST2000DM001, ST3000DM001, ST4000DM000. Had the worst failures with Seagate drive(s). A drive was working one day with nothing bad in the SMART reports to not even recognized by the bios the next day. Had another one that the spindel obviously stopped spinning. It was recognized by the bios and the smart report looked good before but now cannot read the disk. That happened more than once with the 1TB and 2TB drives. By volume the ST3000DM001 drives were the worst at about 8-10 drives and counting.

WD: 250GB enterprise, 250GB desktop, WD1001FALS, WD 2TB black (WD2001FAXS?), WD20EADS*, WD20EARS*, WD30EFRX - I killed 12 of the EADS and EARS drives when a fan failed and a unRAID parity check took them up to 60C. They still worked and my data was safe but the smart reports were starting to go bad with read errors etc so I replaced them as soon as I could but I had to deal with 12+ more that came DOA from Newegg due to poor packaging 6 in a row before I just RMA'd with WD direct. But neither of those problems (overheat and packaging) were WD's fault. By volume (26 drives) the EADS and EARS drives were the worst but as I said that was due to overheat and packaging so not WDs fault.

Hitachi: HDS723020BLA???/ALA???, HDS723030ALA640

Toshiba: DT01ACA300 - failed just after 2 year warranty was up

Samsung: HD103UJ - finally after 10 years and 60146 power on hours got some pending sectors that I cleared by clearing every sector on the drive and then restoring the data.

So you can see I've had plenty of failures from all makers but when you factor in good drives to these it is probably around 20-25% if you count the WD EADS/EARS and ST3000DM001 drives and <10% if you don't.

[Skirge01]

Wow... I totally forgot about all my failed WD10EACS drives (the first "green" drives). I had a nearly identical experience with those as I did with my Seagate ST3000DM001 drives. This is precisely why people need to think in terms of models, rather than manufacturers. Just because one model (or series) of drives had a high failure rate does not necessarily mean that their entire line will be equally bad forever.

[PLUCKYHD]

Just for reference I have had 2 WD blacks fail in a office raid in the last 2 years that were still under 3 years old. Granted WD warrantied them no problem but it just goes to show they aren't perfect either.

Currently I buy red's or blacks depending on price. In the past I used allot of Hitachi's with good luck (believe they were deskstar models) have 4 of them over 5 years old still chugging.

What is interesting is I have a mix of WD, Seagate, Samsung, and hitachi's in my server currently (9 drives total) and all of them are pushing 6 years or older and are working (knock on wood). probably the longest I have gone without a drive failure of some sort at home.

[panteragstk]

The WD green drives are the ones I've had the most issues with. My 2tb Seagate drives have been solid with the exception if one DOA. that was a newegg issue though.

Mine are the 2000m001 drives if I'm not mistaken.

I just had to pull two green WD drives fr my unraid box.

[KryptoNyte]

All three of the 2TB green drives that I purchased 4 or 5 years ago died within three years. I mailed them back under warranty and WD sent me (3) 3TB green drives. Not wanting the new drives to experience the same fate, I disabled the head parking and so far so good.

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by KryptoNyte

All three of the 2TB green drives that I purchased 4 or 5 years ago died within three years. I mailed them back under warranty and WD sent me (3) 3TB green drives. Not wanting the new drives to experience the same fate, I disabled the head parking and so far so good.

The 3TB WD Greens that WD sent me for my 2TB EARS have a firmware problem. I can clear the drive (write zeros to every sector on the disk) and the pending sectors change to 65535. Then the next clear cycle the pending sectors are zero. It alternates like this with each clearing cycle I do. The disks is probably OK but I can't trust them to hold data.

[waynedunham]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

Which model(s)?

I had to dig through my receipts for this one.

11/2003 purchase of ST380013A5(s? can't read my own writing) died in one of my early SageTV servers. Like most of my Seagate drives they just started having sectors go bad/weak. Multiple read attempts, failures, etc.

2/2007 80gb ATA STM3802110A Died in my ReplayTV after a couple years is I recall correctly

7/2008 750Gb ST3750 Did the slow death described above in what was at the time my main CPU.

12/2012 2Tb ST2000VM002 Has not died. I put this in a machine I upgraded for my Mom. It should be OK for her since they only boots the thing up once a month or so.

That is just part of the list that I have receipts for. Most of the others are very old ATA drives in ancient machine, again, most of which died but I have no model #'s since I don't have the receipts, nor the physical drives.

And that is just the partial list of my machines. I used to be the "computer guru" for all the people at work and fixed their machines more times than I want to remember. (but hey, a case of beer and hardware costs are fun). The percentage of failed or failing Seagate drives was the vast majority of hardware related problems I fixed for them.
I grant you that Seagate drives are/were put in the vast majority of the major manufacturers computers so that would also be a factor in their high percentage of failures seen.

I can only think of one WD drive failure I've had and that was on a drive that was way past its 5 year birthday. I have had a lot of other WD and Maxtor drives that I replaced well after running 24/7/365 for over 5 years. Other than that one instance they all were replaced for larger drives or just as a precaution on a drive being a "daily driver" for well over 5 years.
Many of those WD drives ended up making their way into external enclosures for data portability, backing up systems in order to upgrade their now too tiny original HDs.

Today's Seagates may be just fine. Over the years their reliability and QC issues have varied wildly from ultra reliable to "well the drive starts up fine when cold if you just give the machine a good thump to release the heads", to "well that drive lasted almost 2 years".

As with all things, YMMV, but that is my experiences with Seagate drives over the years.