Q: I heard that there’s a class-action lawsuit against Seagate for faulty hard drives. How do I check my computer to see what kind of hard drive I have?
A: In my more than 25 years of working with failed hard drives, I’ve seen this story play out many times with many hard drive manufacturers.
The way I look at it, there are only two kinds of hard drives: those that have failed and those that are going to fail. Plan accordingly.
Traditional magnetic hard drives are mechanical devices that can’t escape the laws of physics, represented by the “bathtub curve” of failure rates. That’s the higher likelihood that a drive will fail in the early or late stages of its use, with an overall lower rate of failure in the middle.
In general, factory defects increase early failures, while at the three-year mark, there’s a measurable increase in hard drive failures from wear and tear. Seagate is the current target because a specific drive that was very popular is deviating from this classic pattern.
A class-action lawsuit was recently filed on behalf of purchasers of the Barracuda 3TB Hard Disk Drive and Backup Plus 3TB External Hard Disk Drive, which have been available since 2011.
The action was brought on in part by the reported decision by BackBlaze, an online backup company, to stop using Seagate’s “ST3000DM001” last year because of unacceptably high failure rates.
The published data showed that BackBlaze experienced a 32 percent failure rate with this specific hard drive, while other drives they were using (including a different 3TB drive from Seagate) ranged from 4 percent to 8 percent failure rates.
The BackBlaze data was not collected in a scientifically controlled manner, so lots of potential explanations may come out over time, but on its face, it should be a reason for concern if all your precious data is being stored on one of these devices.
Windows users can use the “MSinfo32” utility to determine what kind of hard drive their computer is using. Look under the “Components” section for “Storage,” then “Disks” to see if the “Model” section shows the “ST3000DM001.”
Mac users can use the “System Information” or “System Profiler” utility to find the information under the “Storage” section.
If you have, or have had, one of these drives in your computer or as a backup drive and experienced a failure, you can submit your information to the Hagens Berman law firm.
As this is in the very early stages, don’t expect anything to happen quickly — these things can drag on for a long time.
It’s more important to focus on making sure you have a solid automated backup in place, meaning you have at least two copies of your data (preferably three) on two different storage devices.
We sign all of our members up on Carbonite unlimited online backup accounts because we’ve found it to be the best solution for most users. A free trial is available on its website.
Editor’s note: Ken Colburn is founder and CEO of Data Doctors Computer Services.
