Unhappy customers sue Seagate over defective hard drives
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.
The lawsuit, filed on February 2, 2016 states that consumers have lost significant amount of data and were left with broken hardware, as Seagate’s hard drives routinely failed at exceptionally high rates, violating federal consumer laws and Seagate’s own warranties after delivering faulty replacement hard drives.
The lawsuit specifically relates to Seagate’s 3TB hard drive models: the Barracuda 3TB Hard Disk Drive, or the Backup Plus 3TB External Hard Disk Drive.
“Seagate promised purchasers reliable hard drives that would safeguard their important documents and cherished photos, but consumers report that these Seagate hard drives fail sometimes just days after their first use,” said Steve Berman, managing partner of Hagens Berman. “These hard drives failed to deliver on Seagate’s promises, and replacements from Seagate were just as defective, amounting to loss of data and wasted money for thousands of purchasers – something we believe to be direct violation of federal consumer-rights laws.”
Berman added, “Plain and simple, consumers paid for a product that they did not receive, and we intend to fight for their rights to receive payback from Seagate.”
According to the complaint, the above particular hard drives were marketed as innovative, powerful, fast, reliable, dependable, and having extremely low failure rates, when in reality, the failure rate of the drives was substantially higher than advertised. Consumers report them failing at an unprecedented rate.
These claims are backed up by Backblaze, a data backup company, which have stated for several years that Seagate’s Barracuda 3 TB drives were the least reliable in their collection of over 49,000 drives.
According to the firm’s investigation, Seagate promised purchasers that it would replace the failed hard drives, but replacements were also faulty and unreliable at extremely high rates, violating consumer law and Seagate’s drive warranties.
The lawsuit is hoping to deliver consumers compensation for replacement costs, damages from loss of data and data recovery expenses. Anyone who has experienced a Seagate 3 TB drive failure can contact Hagens Berman’s legal team about the class-action lawsuit against Seagate.
