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“Clearly predatory”: Western Digital sparks panic, anger for age-shaming HDDs (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 year ago by nulluser@lemmy.world to c/technology@beehaw.org

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[–] argv_minus_one@beehaw.org 41 points 1 year ago (4 children)

If WD expects its drives to fail after 3 years, then WD is manufacturing shoddy products and it's time to change vendors.

Which is a real shame, because WD was until recently the gold standard of disk drive reliability. To my recollection, I've never seen a WD drive fail.

I've got a machine whose (Seagate, not WD) drives have been powered on for 14 years and they still aren't complaining. They're about to, though—their SMART reports only 1% service life left!

[–] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Everyone has at least one bad story about a brand, and that experience can colour a consumer's view indefinitely. I had a faulty WD drive in the computer I got to start college in 1997 but didn't realize it, instead learning to reinstall Windows every six weeks. I rarely chose WD thereafter.

[–] BeardedGingerWonder@fedia.io 13 points 1 year ago

Everyone has a bad story about a brand for sure, not every brand takes a NAS quality, NAS branded drive they charge a premium for because it's suitable for NAS and switches the underlying tech to something that's fundamentally unsuitable for NAS applications. Then lies about it. Fuck WD.

[–] Fubarberry@aiparadise.moe 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Are you sure it was a faulty drive? I had a similar experience where it got to having to reinstall windows every week, but switching to Linux fixed it.

Best I can tell it was a mandatory windows update clashing with some of the hardware I had.

[–] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

I didn't know what a faulty hard drive sounded like at that time. Sticks with you. But I was playing around with NT5 betas anyway, so it turned out not to be a huge deal.

[–] ipkpjersi@lemmy.one 4 points 1 year ago

Which is a real shame, because WD was until recently the gold standard of disk drive reliability. To my recollection, I’ve never seen a WD drive fail.

Oh boy, I've had about 10 drive failures out of like 46 drives, all WD. I've had 3 WD Red Pro 6TBs fail and 7 WD Red 6TBs fail. This has been over around 7 or so years, although one of the WD Red Pro 6TB drives was bought this year and failed within 2 weeks (over 1000 bad sectors, it had the worst SMART stats I'd ever seen).

The WD Red 6TBs are particularly bad, I've had better luck with the WD Red Pro 6TBs, and then IIRC the WD Red 3TBs are like by far the worst out of WD's Reds.

Not to mention, WD already tried pulling a fast one on customers when they swapped out WD Red drives with SMR drives then had to make a WD Red Plus for their (existing) CMR Red drives. I had a WD Red 6TB drive go bad, replaced it with a brand new WD Red Plus 6TB which immediately went bad, then replaced it with a WD Red Pro 6TB which also went bad within a few days. I replaced that one once again with a brand new WD Red Pro 6TB (I love brick and mortar PC stores, I got an awesome PC store near me) and that drive has been perfectly fine for a few months. My original WD Red 6TB drive in question did last me like, 6 or 7 years, I just got really unlucky with two quick failures in a row but all is good now.

I've not had a great experience with WD, but I've still heard worse things so I am sticking with my WD Red Pro 6TBs for now.

[–] dissonant@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

I have a 13 year old 1tb WD mypassport that I loaded up with pirated movies and took with me to Afghanistan. It's been through a lot, and it's still working well today, not even a blip of an issue. Such a shame when companies drop off in quality.

[–] HighPriestOfALowCult@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This desktop right here (running a couple of ZFS pools) has drives with more than 3 years on it...

$ for d in $(find /dev/sd[a-z]); do sudo smartctl --all --json $d| jq -c '[.model_name,(.power_on_time?.hours?/8760)]' ; done
["CT1000MX500SSD1",2.2034246575342467]
["WDC WD140EDGZ-11B1PA0",0.3791095890410959]
["TOSHIBA HDWE140",4.040639269406393]
["TOSHIBA HDWE140",5.925684931506849]
["WDC WD80EMAZ-00WJTA0",3.359246575342466]
["TOSHIBA HDWE140",5.925684931506849]

runs like a top (better not jinx myself).

[–] azertyfun@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 year ago

Yep, it's basically the best environment for them. Presumably relatively few writes compared to the uptime, in a case with few vibrations (!), very few power cycles (!!!). Basically all it does is spin on a highly precise bearing.

Anyway drive lisepans only matter for cost projections, when it comes to data integrity you should ALWAYS assume that a drive ia about to fail. Because sometimes it fails after 2 years and sometimes it runs for 20, that's just the luck of the draw.