Dealing with hard drive failure

Seagate, an American firm that is known as a giant in the computer storage field and one of the most prominent manufacturers of computer hard drives, faced a massive class-action lawsuit related to their Barracuda 3 TB internal and its Backup Plus 3TB external hard drives. Details about the lawsuit indicate that an individual computer owner in South Dakota purchased both Barracuda internal and external hard drives, which both failed while under warranty. Seagate complied with the warranty and replaced both units, but the replacements happen to fail as well.

What is interesting about this lawsuit is that it includes a reliability report produced by a cloud storage firm named Backblaze. Cloud storage firms use arrays of Internet-connected hard drives to serve their customers; it so happens that Backblaze tested Seagate Barracuda drives in an environment that exceeded their intended performance. Backblaze found structural flaws in the Seagate drives that caused too much vibration, a factor that is known to precipitate failure.

WHY HARD DRIVES FAIL & HOW TO DEFEND AGAINST DATA LOSS

The problem Seagate is facing at this moment is centered on the replacement units that also failed; a court interprets this incident as something that the company was already aware of and neglected to remedy with a recall. Hard drive failure is more common than most consumers think. In some cases, a hard drive can be repaired, but in most other situations they should be replaced. Depending on the type of failure, data recovery may be an option.

Replacing a hard drive is often seen as a sensible alternative to buying a new computer. In general, the moving parts of computer systems are prone to eventual failure, but they can be replaced. At Sonic Systems, we usually take a good look at all components when clients bring their systems in. Whenever we deal with a hardware service such as a failed hard drive, we also look into the possibility of increasing RAM at that time; we do this to extend the life of the computer, which can save our clients both time and money.

When it comes to hard drives, rates of failure are hard to predict, but they can be expected to increase as time goes by. For this reason, data backup options such as external drives, flash memory or cloud storage solutions should be strongly considered.