Lawyers cast fishing nets in class-action Seagate seas

However at the same time, we reckon that this percentage of failures is definitely higher than Seagate is comfortable with.

A national class-action lawsuit was filed by unhappy consumers of Seagate Technologies against the company in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California claiming that the data storage company sold hard drives that “failed to live up to the advertised promises”, according to Hagens Berman, a leading consumer-rights law firm. “According to the suit, “[the drives] failed at exceptionally high rates, leaving consumers with broken hardware and significant loss of data”.

The law firm notes that users who purchased Seagate’s Barracuda 3TB Hard Disk Drive or Backup Plus 3TB External Hard Disk Drive, may be “entitled to damages including replacement costs and damages from loss of data and data recovery expenses”.

“In October 2015, [Backblaze] reported that the Barracuda had an AFR [Annualized failure rate] of 30.94 percent for the first through third quarters of 2015 and an overall failure rate of 28.46 percent dating back to 2013”, read the lawsuit.

Find out more about the Seagate lawsuit. Although Nelson wasn’t able to recover his data, the drive was under a two-year warranty and Seagate sent a replacement. 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 law firm Hagens Berman is still seeking people to join the class action lawsuit, and has posted a contact form for affected Seagate users on its website. Replacing faulty drives with other faulty drives just doesn’t cut it, and the firm was more than happy to file on behalf of Seagate’s disgruntled customer.

The story behind the story: As we’ve noted in the past, Backblaze’s data may not represent the average consumer experience. That’s not to say Seagate isn’t at fault, but the case isn’t so cut-and-dry given the many variables that can factor into hard drive failure.