The failure rates were approximately 5.7 times higher in comparison to other 3 TB drives, for which Seagate faced a class-action lawsuit.
[3] Joel Hruska of ExtremeTech noted that Backblaze was unable to explain the high failure rates of the ST3000DM001 compared to other products.
Hruska provided supplier-change or part substitution, shipping of substandard hardware to increase profits, and Backblaze's use of consumer hard drives in an enterprise environment as possible explanations.
[4] In July 2021, 9to5Mac reported that because the disk was included in the Apple Time Capsule it started to show high failure rates.
[7] Bruno Ferreira of The Tech Report compared the lawsuit with the high failure rates faced by the IBM Deskstar 75GXP and 60GXP hard drives in 2002.
[8] Paul Alcorn of Tom's Hardware argued that Backblaze used the drives in a manner that "far exceeded the warranty conditions" and questioned the "technical merits" of the lawsuit.