Western Digital Sparks Panic, Anger For Age-Shaming HDDs (arstechnica.com) 124
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When should you be concerned about a NAS hard drive failing? Multiple factors are at play, so many might turn to various SMART (self-monitoring, analysis, and reporting technology) data. When it comes to how long the drive has been active, there are backup companies like Backblaze using hard drives that are nearly 8 years old. That may be why some customers have been panicked, confused, and/or angered to see their Western Digital NAS hard drive automatically given a warning label in Synology's DiskStation Manager (DSM) after they were powered on for three years. With no other factors considered for these automatic flags, Western Digital is accused of age-shaming drives to push people to buy new HDDs prematurely.
The practice's revelation is the last straw for some users. Western Digital already had a steep climb to win back NAS customers' trust after shipping NAS drives with SMR (shingled magnetic recording) instead of CMR (conventional magnetic recording). Now, some are saying they won't use or recommend the company's hard drives anymore.
As users have reported online, including on Synology-focused and Synology's own forums, as well as on Reddit and YouTube, Western Digital drives using Western Device Digital Analytics (WDDA) are getting a "warning" stamp in Synology DSM once their power-on hours count hits the three-year mark. WDDA is similar to SMART monitoring and rival offerings, like Seagate's IronWolf, and is supposed to provide analytics and actionable items. The recommended action says: "The drive has accumulated a large number of power on hours [throughout] the entire life of the drive. Please consider to replace the drive soon." There seem to be no discernible problems with the hard drives otherwise.
Synology confirmed this to Ars Technica and noted that the labels come from Western Digital, not Synology. A spokesperson said the "WDDA monitoring and testing subsystem is developed by Western Digital, including the warning after they reach a certain number of power-on-hours." The practice has caused some, like YouTuber SpaceRex, to stop recommending Western Digital drives for the foreseeable future. In May, the YouTuber and tech consultant described his outrage, saying three years is "absolutely nothing" for a NAS drive and lamenting the flags having nothing to do with anything besides whether or not a drive has been in use for three years. A user on SynoForum discussed their "panic" upon seeing the label. And SpaceRex said one of its clients also panicked and quickly replaced the "warning" drives out of fear of losing business-critical data. "It is clearly predatory tactics by Western Digital trying to sell more hard drives," SpaceRex said in a June 10 video. "Users are also concerned that this could prevent people from noticing serious problems with their drive," adds Ars. "Further, you can't repair a pool with a drive marked with a warning label."
Some of the affected products with WDDA include the WD Red Pro, WD Red Plus, and WD Purple. A discussion post about how to disable WDDA via SSH can be found here.
As users have reported online, including on Synology-focused and Synology's own forums, as well as on Reddit and YouTube, Western Digital drives using Western Device Digital Analytics (WDDA) are getting a "warning" stamp in Synology DSM once their power-on hours count hits the three-year mark. WDDA is similar to SMART monitoring and rival offerings, like Seagate's IronWolf, and is supposed to provide analytics and actionable items. The recommended action says: "The drive has accumulated a large number of power on hours [throughout] the entire life of the drive. Please consider to replace the drive soon." There seem to be no discernible problems with the hard drives otherwise.
Synology confirmed this to Ars Technica and noted that the labels come from Western Digital, not Synology. A spokesperson said the "WDDA monitoring and testing subsystem is developed by Western Digital, including the warning after they reach a certain number of power-on-hours." The practice has caused some, like YouTuber SpaceRex, to stop recommending Western Digital drives for the foreseeable future. In May, the YouTuber and tech consultant described his outrage, saying three years is "absolutely nothing" for a NAS drive and lamenting the flags having nothing to do with anything besides whether or not a drive has been in use for three years. A user on SynoForum discussed their "panic" upon seeing the label. And SpaceRex said one of its clients also panicked and quickly replaced the "warning" drives out of fear of losing business-critical data. "It is clearly predatory tactics by Western Digital trying to sell more hard drives," SpaceRex said in a June 10 video. "Users are also concerned that this could prevent people from noticing serious problems with their drive," adds Ars. "Further, you can't repair a pool with a drive marked with a warning label."
Some of the affected products with WDDA include the WD Red Pro, WD Red Plus, and WD Purple. A discussion post about how to disable WDDA via SSH can be found here.
Yea. What're you gonna do buy Seagate? (Score:2)
Nothing else is left. There is no where to run that's better. They know that. It's by design.
Re:Yea. What're you gonna do buy Seagate? (Score:5, Informative)
Seagate with their Ironwolf range has been better. You also have Toshiba N300 disks.
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Re:Yea. What're you gonna do buy Seagate? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder what WD's customer support will do if you try to replace the drive under warranty. After all the drive itself told you to replace it. Surely that's a valid warranty claim right?
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I've had many Seagate (and WD) disks over many years (IDE, SATA and SCSI) and have never had any problems with any of them. I did once have a SCSI drive (can't remember if it was Seagate or WD) that sat for 3 years after 6+ years of continuous use that simply clicked and refused to spin up, but I lightly wacked the side of it with a screwdriver handle and it then spun right up and I pulled all the data off it.
The biggest issue now seems to be getting what you pay for and the deliberate SMR/CMR confusion
Re:Yea. What're you gonna do buy Seagate? (Score:5, Informative)
Everything I've seen suggests there's not much a difference in quality between Seagate and Western Digital in general. Each will have specific models that are unusually good or bad, but usually you don't know that until there's several years of data on the model.
The little bias there is seems to be that WD does a little better for people who turn their computers on and off a lot, but Seagate does better for people who leave their computers on all the time. So in a NAS case, yeah, switching to Seagate might not be a bad idea.
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I mean, anecdotal evidence is pretty worthless, but I remember when we had a computer store in Oregon and more then 1/2 of the Western Digital drives we had were bad, this caused us so many problems it cost us the business. So I don't touch Western Digital. But that was around 2000 and I have seen that crown of shit passed between the drive manufactures.
Taken together, our anecdotes support the GP's claim.,
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You'll note that I said "Each will have specific models that are unusually good or bad". Both manufacturers had the issues you mentioned.
As for the data, everything I've seen shows little difference between enterprise and consumer drives. Western Digital branded enterprise drives actually seem a little worse, Seagate's about the same. HGST's drives do seem to be noticeably more reliable than anyone else's drives, but also significantly more expensive. They're owned by WD now, so it blurs the picture a bit.
A
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You forgot Toshiba. That is also an option.
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Yes. Because every storage company has had a stinker. It doesn't make their overall product range unreliable. I have very similar failure rates from Seagate and WD at home. That's just an anecdote. Backblaze on the other hand has hundreds of thousands of data points that confirm they also don't consider Seagate to be unreliable, and they are a company who derive profit from operating reliable datastorage.
Self-defeating (Score:5, Interesting)
Also before I get down off my soap box, I'm going to engage in millennial-shaming by pointing out how stupid the term "x-shaming" is. Yes, I realize I've debased myself by uttering a derivation of it in the previous sentence, but I feel properly ashamed after having done so. It's as much of a pet peeve as people who misuse the phrase "begs the question" inappropriately. Editors should be allowed to beat the writing staff.
Re: Self-defeating (Score:3)
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But they don't. Neither does WDs drives. Drives fail either immediately due to defects, or after 10-20 years
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Aren't all hard drives manufactured by the same Taiwanese company, and an appropriate company label (Seagate, Western Digital) applied afterwards? Isn't that why all hard drive prices skyrocketed when Taiwan flooded?
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No, Western Digital drives are manufactured in Thailand.
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No, most of the HD factories (run by multiple companies) were located in Thailand (not Taiwan) for historical reasons, and all of the factories were damaged due to flooding in Thailand.
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...were located in Thailand...
Of course you're correct it was Thailand rather than Taiwan. Thanks to those who corrected me.
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I find that around the 10 year mark my drives often develop faults. I have some drives from the 90s, but the majority seem to have an 8-10 year lifespan before they start to corrupt data.
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Editors should be allowed to beat the writing staff.
That would be... self-flagellation.
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These days, beating the writing staff would involve a hammer for the CPU.
Re:Self-defeating (Score:5, Informative)
Why would I buy more drives from a company that doesn't expect their product to be reliable after 3 years? This is not going to help the company sell more drives.
I've been using PC hard drives since the 1990's. In that time, I have had 2 drive failures. I've had probably 6 SSD failures already. But right - HDD's are unreliable, and SSD's are close to complete reliability.
This reminds me of when LCD screens started taking over. I'd go into Best Buy to look at stuff, and dayum, the CRT screens looked like crap. I found the jerks purposely adjusted the controls to make them look like crap.
Best Buy ant others wanted to make LCD screens look better by comparison, And WD wants to shut down their HDD lines, they put out BS about how bad HDD's are.
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I don't know what junk SSDs you have been buying but there are a lot of choices for that on the market. I have seen several bad SSDs. But it was really by brand. Samsung has only seen a single failure in all the drives I've touched and that was an NVMe running heavy backup jobs daily with no heatsink. And I would say that all NVMe drives used heavily should have at least passive cooling. Thermal throttling is not much better than burning itself up if you actually want the performance.
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I've had one SSD fail, but that's more because of abuse than anything - it was a 1.8" SATA SSD and it didn't fit in the 1.8" drive bay of the laptop, so I took the drive out of case and stuffed the bare board into the laptop. I expect it died because it overheated or something.
Work had one fail but was resurrected - it was a 2.5" laptop SSD and the owner dropped his laptop on the floor while it was operating. This resulted in the SSD returning a size of 8MB. It was fixed by sending it a ATA_SECURE_ERASE com
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No, but PCBs can have unintentionally moving parts if you hit them hard enough. Result undefined.
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6 years is above the mechanical drive average, IME. As long as I was doing regular backups, I would buy a new drive and move on.
It does teach a good lesson on never relying on being able to recover a drive after the fact with no backups.
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It also seems like a really poor use case for flash storage at a time when it was a lot more expensive. If you mostly used it while traveling it could also be environmental - like humidity becoming moisture damage.
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It also seems like a really poor use case for flash storage at a time when it was a lot more expensive. If you mostly used it while traveling it could also be environmental - like humidity becoming moisture damage.
I see - So SSD's are superior to hard drives unless you buy a Junk one, and you know it is a junk one because it failed. I bought shit, and he wasn't using the SSD correctly - so many rules us mere mortals need taught.
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It also seems like a really poor use case for flash storage at a time when it was a lot more expensive.
That depends on your use. I needed storage that could support high-speed large video recording directly from a camera (camera supported hight bit depth recording to media over SD card), and also editing of very high resolution images from a laptop. So I had a fast enclosure as well.
If you mostly used it while traveling it could also be environmental
Although that could be the case, I thought the drive was pretty well sealed to prevent exactly that... maybe not though. But there again, it makes me think less of the brand that would even be possible and since Samsung is one of the top brands in that field, mass me not really trust any SSD all that much.
I'm getting the impression that if a SSD fails, it is always our fault, not the SSD's. Who knew?
Re: Had a bit of bad luck with SSD (Score:2)
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Obviously they're not in continuous use and running them 24/7 is going to wear out the bearings or other mechanical parts far more quickly, but even then most technology follows a bathtub curve as far as failures go. If it lasts the first six mont
Re:Self-defeating (Score:5, Informative)
Obviously they're not in continuous use and running them 24/7 is going to wear out the bearings or other mechanical parts far more quickly, but even then most technology follows a bathtub curve as far as failures go. If it lasts the first six months it'll probably last another twenty years.
Everything I've seen on hard drive reliability suggests that powering on/off the drive is pretty stressful, and drives that are left on all the time tend to last longer than ones with frequent power cycling.
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You're absolutely right. That's why drives keep a log of this and throw up a warning when you power cycle them over .... 100000 times.
Technically correct is the best kind of correct, but it's not relevant. You shouldn't worry about your HDD even if you are powering down your PC multiple times a day. In fact since about the release of Windows XP SP2 your HDD is probably powering itself down even when your PC is running to save on power.
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What brand SSDs did you have fail? I haven't had one fail yet, but I don't really stick with any one manufacturer. If you've had bad experiences with one, I'd be glad to know who to stay away from in the future. There were some HDD manufacturers I quit buying from way back in the day for a lot of similar issues.
I've had Samsungs, a PNY, WD, And I forget the other two.
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Over the last 30 years or so I've had a solid third of all spinning disks I've ever owned fail within 3-5 years. Typically I always left the computers on 24/7, for years at a time. Not sure how many disks that is exactly, but had to be at least half a dozen failures.
By comparison I've owned a total of 3 or 4 SSDs in the last 10 years, and have lost one of them to failure. So nearly the same failure rate as the spinning disks, actually.
I can say this much, though. SSDs are much more reliable than LED ligh
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I've been using PC hard drives since the 1990's. In that time, I have had 2 drive failures. I've had probably 6 SSD failures already. But right - HDD's are unreliable, and SSD's are close to complete reliability.
What are you doing to your SSDs? I've never had an SSD failure, and I still have fucking OCZ Vector 3s in service here which were infamously poor reliability.
No what you have is some very strange observer bias. HDDs are not more reliable than SSDs, and WD isn't engaging in some conspiracy because ... (and to be clear a decent conspiracy needs to have something in it for the conspirator) HDDs and SSD have two different applications with two different purposes and you're not replacing one with the other in a
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I've been using PC hard drives since the 1990's. In that time, I have had 2 drive failures. I've had probably 6 SSD failures already. But right - HDD's are unreliable, and SSD's are close to complete reliability.
I did not read anywhere in the OP's statement about bringing up the topic of HDD vs SSD reliability. He merely stated that he would not trust a company's product (in this case HDDs) if that company did not expect that product to be reliable in 3 years. From the standpoint of HDDs there is only Seagate and Toshiba as alternatives.
Re: Self-defeating (Score:2)
Woah there, donâ(TM)t you go shame-shaming people!
Does smartd see it? (Score:3)
This is the first time I ever heard of WDDA, but does it generate actual SMART data or events, such that smartd and smartctl see it? Because if those don't see it, I won't see it.
Re:Does smartd see it? (Score:5, Informative)
This is a software package has been bundled onto the NAS. Actually several brands of NAS. But it's mostly SMART but with some extra unspecifed recommendations added. Seems that this was a secret bomb planted 3 years ago.
Synolgoy for its part has dropped WDDA and Seagate's Ironwolf software for all models 2022 and newer.
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And SHR is pretty convenient when you're dealing with mixed drive sizes. They're not the high-performance option; they're the "pretty good but easy enough that non-tech people can use it and not be tota
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I did own a 2-bay NAS years ago, moved off it and onto an Unraid home server using off-the-shelf hardware. Proved much cheaper in the long run (also in the short run, if I think about it).
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That's the thing with Unraid, it's all GUI, click and configure, really easy.
I went for Unraid after checking NAS variants.
When I built a machine and installed it, I knew very little about Linux, enough to run a few simple commands in terminal after looking them up online. I didn't have to, with Unraid. Now I have dozens of dockers in there, it handles my media, my downloads, CCTV, you-name-it, all on a relatively low-specced PC.
It has a Ryzen 2400G, a HBA PCI Express Card (with all my HDDs attached to it),
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You're welcome!
It's one of the few distros done right, which proves Linux-based operating systems CAN be genpop-friendly.
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That one's from the 70s, give or take.
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WDDA: https://www.westerndigital.com... [westerndigital.com]
It's a tool for communicating HDD data analysis a NVR or a DVR. I'm not 100% positive it uses SMART data, but it's very likely.
I don't have access to a Synology system, but it seems that Synology DSM just reads warnings from WDDA. So, if WDDA just communicates a warning, can't DSM just ignore it or just flag it as a WD warning that is explained as something that can be ignored if the user so desires.
If DSM can handle SMART warnings, it should be able to handle WDDA warnings. Some SMART warnings are opaque, where the drive reads some parameter and then computes a warning based on an internal formula. Some SMART warnings and numbe
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It's a scummy tactic, that's what people have a beef with. We the Shlashdot crowd are (arguably) more technical, and we know whether to ignore such a warning or not, but remember, the target for Synology NAS products is comprised of less technical people who would easily be fooled by such a warning.
Planned obsolescence is annoying.
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Maybe things changed, but back in the day, Synology SHR was the default option. AFAIK, that was proprietary.
Welcome to the Duopoly of HDDs (Score:2)
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My old NAS had four drives. Two Seagate, two WD. Both Seagates died within a few months of each other; both WD are still going ten years on. My new one has 5 x WD Gold.
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Were the 2 Seagate drives bought at the same time (and for that matter, were the WD?).
It's a common thing when initially setting up a NAS to buy all the drives at the same time, which mean they're likely all from the same batch, which means if there's a flaw that leads to shorter-than-expected lifespan in that batch, all the drives will tend to fail after similar usage.
If you have to buy a batch of drives all at once, and you want them all to be the same model, best option is to buy from multiple vendors. Y
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Re:Welcome to the Duopoly of HDDs (Score:5, Informative)
Well you can either be annoyed by mislabelling or you can be annoyed by an actual failing drive. When the choice is WD or Seagate and Seagate fails twice as often... Is there really a choice? Recommend or not...
Sure you could pay a premium for Toshiba drives but they are enterprise drives not NAS drives for regular users.
Sorry to correct you, but toshiba has both NAS drives (N series) and Surveillance drives (S Series). Also, a wide range of other models, not only enterprise drives...
HP to buy Western Digital, then? (Score:2)
Re: Slimebag co's might as well merge (Score:1)
To be called SkynetGPT.
Should be "info" not "warning" (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, let me know my drive has reached certain milestones. After all, my printer tells me when the toner/ink or paper-supply is low-but-not-out.
But don't disable functionality unless it's truly failing or about to fail.
Power-on hours is nowhere near the top of my "want to monitor" list, but it is on the list. It's a bit above "years since manufacture date" but far, far below "number of spare sectors used."
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Yep, exactly.
This is an over-extension of what might otherwise be useful, helpful notifications for people. 3 years is typically the 'high water mark' for drives: the median age (or average, I don't remember) at which they fail. Generally, if a drive makes it to 3 years without failure, though, it's fine until about 5 or 6 years.
This is just misapplication of statistics leading to bad tech folklore "best practices", and someone thinking it's helpful information. They probably mined data from support cases o
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If I saw that message after 3 years I'd open negotiations with the place I bought it from for a partial refund. The law in the UK requires that things last a "reasonable length of time", and 3 years for a HDD is not reasonable. I'd be looking for a 50% refund or replacement drive.
Check the links? (Score:2)
I love how this post goes up with a link to a Subreddit that has been marked private for 48 hours without any attention given.
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Something like 85% of major (50+ users) subreddits have gone dark as a form of protest to Reddit's new API policies. Most people weren't aware it was even coming.
What? "Age Shaming"? (Score:4, Insightful)
How does that phrase even remotely fit? Is this imbecilic writer saying Western Digital is trying to make older HDDs feel bad about being older?
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No, it's making you feel bad for having an old HDD. The HDD itself doesn't care, it doesn't have feelings. You on the other hand in theory have feelings. And you don't like them hurt right? So why do you run drives older than 3 years? Is it because you're poor? For shame man.
Rule #1: the vendors free tool is always crap. (Score:2)
Rule #1: the vendors free tool is always crap.
Be it logitech, wd, seagate, sony, or any laptop vendor. The tool is almost always poorly coded and poorly thought out, and has way too much input from Marketing.
I would put the shame on Synology on being stupid enough to even install the vendors half-assed tool to gauge drive health.
The drive vendors have had 20+ years to make smart work right and it is still not 100% trustworthy anyway. I have had a few perfectly good disk show as failed (and still function
Is it bad advice? (Score:2)
Assuming you're a NAS sitting in my parent's house, that my father bought 10 years ago for backing up consulting documents, that I don't know about, I like this kind of "feature". The number of times I've had someone ask me if X should be replaced, well, I don't know, not off the top of my head. Sometimes, if I'm rushed, I'll say X has a 3-year life, if it's been 3 years, repl
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I agree. It's a bit vague if this warning impacts any functionality of the drive, but assuming it doesn't, this seems like a really useful warning.
The devil of course is in the details. Does it keep pestering the user. Can they dismiss the warning? Does it reappear after 1 year...
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HDDs are cheap, 6 TB for ~$150, give or take, from Amazon Canada, so if the drive is about to enter anything "risky" in terms of life expectancy, get rid of it.
Assuming you care enough about backups, you'll use Raid 5 / 6, or RaidZ1 / RaidZ2, using the price above, you'd have 12TB usable space, and spend $450 – $600 CAD. When that 3 years ticks by, what makes more sense? Educate t
"Age Shaming"? (Score:1)
I'm so fucking sick of everyone trying to keep me in a constant state of bitter anger so they can show me adverts online.
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You could put the keyboard down and go offline. It is possible, pretty sure its spring time where you are, go out and enjoy it.
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PSA: Toshiba also sells HDDs (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember that, aside from WD and Seagate, Toshiba also makes HDDs. The N series is for NAS, and the S series is for surveillance.
No Shingled Sh!7 on NAS drives, no 7200RPM drives marked as "5400RPM class performance" drives (with the extra vibration, noise and power consumption), no weird warnings after 3 years...
I say it in these terms, because the article lives at the confluence of HDDs and NAS.
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Yes, but are they any good? It's been a long time since I've bought one, because there was quite a long period of time that they were known as Trashiba, and their drives caused the failure of many a redundant array of drives.
Personally, I've bought Ultrastar drives since the late 90s when they had the "Deathstar" click-of-death 40GB drives due to how well they've handled that situation. In prod, I've seen them fail less often than any other model, whether it's a WD, IBM, or HGST drive. I've personally not h
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Yes, but are they any good?
Yes. There's not a manufacturer currently on the market that stands out as bad. Every manufacturer has released a couple of duds over their years. But manufacturers that genuinely have quality control issues are those who go out of business.
I've bought Ultrastar drives since the late 90s when they had the "Deathstar" click-of-death 40GB drives due to how well they've handled that situation.
Ultrastars never had an issue. The click-of-death was exclusive to the Deskstar line of drives, and only 2 models of them. They were also under IBM's stewardship which was half a decade before the division was sold to Toshiba. I returned 6 Deathstars on warranty claims,
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The only manufacturer I've seen with bad numbers in the past 3-5 years - consistently - has been Seagate. 3-18% AFR type bad for various models.
r/synology has gone dark (Score:1)
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They used bad memory chips
Is the warranty on these drives also 3 years? (Score:2)
Long ago I decided to never buy a HDD with a warranty shorter than 5 years - lots of help that was for my chosen Seagates (IBM sold their division to Hitachi so that was that) where every one ran out of relocatable secto
WD (Score:2)
(After 3 years) Western Digital Bogdenoff: "DUMP EHHT!"
Maybe it's serious a warning :) (Score:2)
Western Digital Sparks Panic, Anger (Score:4, Funny)
Nearly got me (Score:1)
I guess I'm glad I have IronWolfs... (Score:2)
I pay for the IronWolf, but don't get any of this nonsense.
Been running 3 x WD 1TB Enterprise Drives in RAID5 (Score:3)
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Start/stop count of 227 and power on hours of 102957 (11.75 years).
In my house, so not kept particularly cool:
Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.C
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 51
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0012 084 084 000 Old_age Always - 113476
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 005 Pre-fail Always - 0
SMART Error Log Version: 0
No Errors Logged
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For many years, HGST was my preferred vendor for hard drives at my day job. They appeared to be reliable and scored well on BackBlaze's reports.
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How many "nines" reliability? (Score:2)
Shameless click-bait (Score:2)
No doubt the story will get more attention with the phrase "age shaming" as opposed to "exaggerating MTBF".
Don't anthropomorphize HDDs. They hate it when you do that.
Now excuse me while I work on my paper, "Resolving racist conditions in multi-threaded network job applications". I'm expecting it to be widely circulated.
So.... (Score:2)
....where might one find this giant fire-sale of used, fast, giant NAS drives so "dangerously risky" to use?
Asking for a friend.
Plan to hire Don Lemon now on hold (Score:2)
He was going to voice a warning about the HDD "not being in her prime".
boing! (Score:1)
Abusing SMART makes it worthless (Score:2)
If you abuse SMART to pump out bullshit errors, that just makes people ignore SMART.
I remember when SMART was a new thing it was common for hard drives to incorrectly report potential failure messages, and "fancy" new PC BIOSes of the time would bitch and whine about it at each startup. The standard procedure was to test the drive out, make additional backups if needed, and if everything looked fine then just disable the damn thing to shut it up. Those drives never actually failed.
I have a tiny home file se
Sounds like the WD I know (Score:2)
WD is after all the company that came up with the genius idea to unload heads after 8 seconds of inactivity which setup a nasty oscillation with the OS where the load / unload cycle count would rapidly exceed the rated threshold within a year.
Despite this being an obvious and trivially preventable problem of which there were a huge number of complaints they sat on their thumbs and refused to fix it.
Disabling WDDA (Score:4, Informative)
Since no-one else has pointed it out, you can disable WDDA quite simply by SSHing to the Synology NAS and entering the following:
sudo synosetkeyvalue /etc.defaults/synoinfo.conf support_wdda no
You shouldn't have to do this, but at least you can.