Consumers File National Class-Action Vs. Seagate for Defective Barracuda 3TB HDDs

Consumers filed a national class-action lawsuit against Seagate Technologies LLC, claiming the storage company sold HDDs that routinely failed at exceptionally high rates, leaving consumers with broken hardware and significant loss of data, according to Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP, a consumer-rights law firm.

The lawsuit, filed on Feb. 2, 2016, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, states that consumers have lost massive amounts of data unexpectedly, as Seagate’s HDDs failed to live up to the advertised promises, violating federal consumer laws and Seagate’s own warranties after delivering faulty replacement HDDs.

“Seagate promised purchasers reliable HDDs that would safeguard their important documents and cherished photos, but consumers report that these Seagate HDDs fail sometimes just days after their first use,” said Steve Berman, managing partner, Hagens Berman. “These HDDs 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.”

If you purchased Seagate’s Barracuda 3TB HDD or Backup Plus 3TB external HDD, you may be entitled to damages including replacement costs and damages from loss of data and data recovery expenses.

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.”

The complaint states that these particular HDDs 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 Backblaze, Inc., a backup company.

According to the firm’s investigation, Seagate promised purchasers that it would replace the failed HDDs, but replacements were also defective and failed at extremely high rates, leaving Seagate’s warranty promise unfulfilled, and consumers without working HDDs.

The suit’s named plaintiff suffered a complete unexpected failure and loss of data when his Backup Plus HDD unexpectedly crashed, causing him to lose irreplaceable photos and documents. Less than a year after the plaintiff received the replacement drive from Seagate, it too failed, rendering it useless.

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