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from the don't-forget-to-back-your-stuff-up dept.
Consumers [on February 2, 2016] filed a class-action lawsuit against data storage company Seagate, after it had continued to sell a 3TB hard drive model that had an 'exceptionally' high failure rate. The case is based on figures released by data backup company Backblaze, who found that failure rates for the ST3000DM001 were not only far higher than other drives, but also did not display a typical 'bathtub-shaped' failure rate curve. Backblaze's report has since been accused of not representing real-world use. Seagate is likely to adopt this line as it responds to the suit.
Also covered at Tom's Hardware which goes into considerable detail as to how these were consumer drives, used in a 24/7 enterprise environment.
In short, by its own admission, Backblaze employed consumer-class drives in a high-volume enterprise-class environment that far exceeded the warranty conditions of the HDDs. Backblaze installed consumer drives into a number of revisions of its own internally developed chassis, many of which utilized a rubber band to "reduce the vibration" of a vertically mounted HDD.
The first revision of the pods, pictured above, had no fasteners for securing the drive into the chassis. As shown, a heavy HDD is mounted vertically on top of a thin multiplexer PCB. The SATA connectors are bearing the full weight of the drive, and factoring the vibration of a normal HDD into the non-supported equation creates the almost perfect recipe for device failure.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Nerdfest on Monday February 08 2016, @02:19PM
That's a possible problem with the lawsuit, but nothing really to do with BackBlaze. It's great that they do this, and I really don't see much difference between commercial and consumer use these days. Many people run their computers 24/7, and all the machines I see running Windows have the hard drive thrashing continuously. If I were to make a hard drive purchase, I'd consider BackBlaze's data the perfect resource.