Western Digital up to dirty tricks, issuing warnings at exactly 3 years old

M

MrRobinHood

Getting comfortable
Nov 29, 2021
187
353
England
Sad to see WD up to this, tarnishing their reputation




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oooooookay........ No, it's not OK. We are fu**. No WD, what else? Seagate?? Don't think, they are better. And after their disaster with the DM001 Series of drives, I neither trust them. Hitachi? Just had 2 failed drives in the Data Center nearly at the same time. I was so glad, I had RaidZ2 on the System. Toshiba? Well, after 2 years their drives started to build bad sectors. To be honest, in the IT somehow everything is f up right now.
 
I was watching that SpaceRex YouTube video over the weekend. Sounds like the new policy effects pretty much all the WD NAS and surveillance hard drives. After 3 years the drive will get flagged as bad, so you won't get any bad sector alerts.
 
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My three WD 10TB Purple drives in my BI server are 5 and 4 years old. They are just fine. I have a QNAP NAS with two 6TB WD Reds in there and they are over six years old and are fine. Just another alarmist video to get clicks for adds.
 
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samplenhold said:
My three WD 10TB Purple drives in my BI server are 5 and 4 years old. They are just fine. I have a QNAP NAS with two 6TB WD Reds in there and they are over six years old and are fine. Just another alarmist video to get clicks for adds.
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Sorry, I don't quite understand your logic here. If you have older drives where this isn't implemented yet, why is it alarmist to point out that they are implementing it for 3 years now?

Good journalism would have asked for a statement from the company. I didn't watch the full length, so I don't know if he did that.
 
Ri22o said:
If you're not running a Synology system, is this an issue?
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Yes, of course. You get a SMART Warning. The Question is, how will the NAS behave. For example ZFS do not give a sh*t about SMART. Everything is in the hand of the User. But some NAS may be do. For example, they can say: Mimimi, this drive has bad SMART, so you can't create a new Array with this drive. What kind of NAS do this? No idea, because I threw my Synology NAS out of my network about 3 years ago.
 
LL0rd said:
Yes, of course. You get a SMART Warning. The Question is, how will the NAS behave. For example ZFS do not give a sh*t about SMART. Everything is in the hand of the User. But some NAS may be do. For example, they can say: Mimimi, this drive has bad SMART, so you can't create a new Array with this drive. What kind of NAS do this? No idea, because I threw my Synology NAS out of my network about 3 years ago.
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I am not running any NAS, just the WD drives in my BI PC. Will this be a concern for a non-NAS system?
 
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Ri22o said:
I am not running any NAS, just the WD drives in my BI PC. Will this be a concern for a non-NAS system?
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Ok, then i have a question for you. Let's just imagine, one of your drives would fail. For example you get bad sectors or something like that. How would you notice that?
 
According to the synology forum link in the OP, it is just a warning based on WDDA (Western Digital Device Analytics) power-on-hours data. The drive is still functioning and S.M.A.R.T. tests reveal no issue.

It might be a good thing for most who most likely do not have any type of S.M.A.R.T. monitoring enabled. Some might be proactive and establish a plan to replace drives (at some point) before they fail. Not as critical in a NAS when you have it set-up correctly. Hot swapping a failed HDD for a new one and watching the data rebuild is a great option to have. But if the drive is the sole purple/red drive in a machine storing data, a warning does not seem like terrible thing
 
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