Consumers on Monday filed a national class-action lawsuit against Seagate Technologies, claiming the data storage company sold hard drives that routinely failed at exceptionally high rates, leaving consumers with broken hardware and significant loss of data, according to Hagens Berman, the law firm attached to the suit. The , filed today in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, states that Seagate’s hard drives failed to live up to the advertised promises, violated federal consumer laws, as well as Seagate’s own warranties after delivering faulty replacement hard drives.
The complaint states that these particular hard drives were marketed as innovative, fast, powerful, 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 – sometimes even days after their first use, according to the suit and reports published by data backup firm Backblaze. The 3TB Seagate drive was used in the late 2012 27-inch iMac, that Apple issued a repair authorization extension program over, in June of 2015.
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.”
According to the firm’s investigation, Seagate promised purchasers that it would replace the failed hard drives, but replacements were also defective and failed at extremely high rates, leaving Seagate’s warranty promise unfulfilled, and consumers without working hard drives. The suit’s named plaintiff suffered a complete unexpected failure and loss of data when his Backup Plus hard drive unexpectedly crashed, causing him to lose stored photos and documents. Less than a year after the plaintiff received the replacement drive from Seagate, it too failed.
Hagens Berman has set up an information page for current or past owners of the drives. The firm isn’t promising anything, but notes that “If you purchased Seagate’s Barracuda 3TB Hard Disk Drive or Backup Plus 3TB External Hard Disk Drive, you may be entitled to damages including replacement costs and damages from loss of data and data recovery expenses.”
