Seagate Faces Another Class Action Lawsuit Over Hard Drive Defect

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Seagate Technology has been hit with another potential class action lawsuit stemming over allegations that the data storage company actively concealed known defects that cause its hard drives to fail prematurely.

Plaintiffs Adam Ginsberg, Dudley Lane Dortch IV, Dennis Crawford, and David Schechner filed the Seagate class action lawsuit last Friday over claims that the various Seagate hard drives they purchased failed months, weeks or even days after the first use.

Dortch says he purchased eight new Internal Barracudas in 2013 as a way to store movies and family pictures. Within the first 90 days, Dortch alleges one of his drives suffered a catastrophic failure and was replaced with a refurbished unit. However, before the replacement arrived, Dortch claims another hard drive failed and was again replaced with a refurbished unit which failed six months later.

In total, the plaintiff alleges losing massive amounts of personal data due to the failure of four Seagate hard drives. Dortch says ultimately he had to pay thousands of dollars for an outside company to recover his data.

According to the Seagate defect class action lawsuit, the data storage company falsely advertises that their hard drives have less than a one percent chance of failing at least within the first three years of use.

In addition, the Seagate hard drive class action lawsuit claims that the company failed to provide non-defective replacements for the failed storage units which is a breach of express and implied warranties.

The plaintiffs allege that the warranty provided by Seagate did not provide recovering the lost data unless a customer paid for an “engagement fee” and a “recovery fee” which can cost more than $2,000.

This lawsuit comes just days after plaintiff Christopher Nelson filed a proposed class action lawsuit alleging similar claims against Seagate. Nelson says he purchased a Backup Plus hard drive in November 2012, and it suffered a “sudden, complete and catastrophic failure” in early December 2014 which rendered it essentially useless.

According to the plaintiffs’ attorneys, more than 1,000 Seagate consumers have come forward with similar allegations since Nelson filed his lawsuit.

“There has been an outpouring of concern across the country from those who lost irreplaceable data and hundreds of dollars due to Seagate’s defective drives and unreliable replacements,” said an attorney from the law firm representing the plaintiffs. “We’re continuing to expand our investigation into Seagate’s widespread sale of faulty hardware and look forward to finding out more from those who have been affected.”

If approved, this Seagate hard drive class action lawsuit would be open to all Class Members in the U.S. who purchased, not for resale, at least one Seagate model ST3000DM001 hard drive, or at least one external drive that contained a drive with the aforesaid model number. The plaintiffs have also proposed subclasses in the following states: California, South Carolina, New York, and Florida.

The plaintiffs are represented by Jeff D. Friedman and Steve W. Berman of Hagens Bergman Sobol Shapiro LLP and Marc A. Goldrich of Sheller, P.C.

The Seagate Faulty Hard Drive Class Action Lawsuit is Ginsberg et al. v. Seagate Technology LLC, Case No. 5:16-cv-00612 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

UPDATE: On June 15, 2018, a judge says that consumers claiming that Seagate sold defective hard drives must divide into multiple Classesbased on the failure rates of the various hard drives.