Class Suit Alleging Seagate Disk Drive Defect Revived

A class of Californians who purchased hard disk drives from Seagate Technology LLC can proceed on claims the company made material omissions about the failure rates of the devices, a state appellate court said Thursday.

The suit alleged certain Seagate backup drives contained a latent defect that caused them to fail at rates higher than the 1% advertised by the company, resulting in data loss. The company’s misrepresentations and omissions about the reliability and failure rates of the drives violated the Consumer Legal Remedies Act and California’s Unfair Competition Law.

A trial court in San Francisco certified a class for ...