Seagate has always been the brand leaders in hard drive quality. Sure, they’ve had some issues with firmware bugs in the past, but that is behind them and generally speaking their hard drives are some of the best around. Lately though, they have had some issues with their 3TB series in particular the ST3000DM001, 000 and 002 suffixes.

Take a look at Backblaze’s statistics and the ST3000DM001 has the highest failure rate of all the drives. Ok so Backblaze put hard drives through their paces, but this model has a 28% failure rate. Similarly Apple have a replacement program for any Seagate 3TB drives that fit into this category.

If you have any of the 3TB DM series of hard disk drives, make sure you religiously keep your data backed up. Better still replace the drive. If this is installed in an Apple product check out their replacement program – you may be eligible for a new hard drive!

So what is the problem with these Seagate hard drives? Once again the problems seem to relate to corrupted firmware code stored in the hard drive’s service area. Other issues include the media cache.

Typically we are seeing twice the number of Seagate hard drives for data recovery and most are the DM series. Before you judge though, remember that Seagate are one of the biggest manufacturers and they are still making high quality hard drives. The failure rate is still only proportional with the number of hard drives they produce. So don’t worry unduly unless you have the DM series!