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Read this, then checked my old My Book Live. Sure enough... everything's gone. I just used it for continuous laptop backups over my LAN, so unless one of them
by fallingknife_ 5y ago
Read this, then checked my old My Book Live.
Sure enough... everything's gone.
I just used it for continuous laptop backups over my LAN, so unless one of them crashes tonight, I should be good. But, this will certainly give me pause when considering WD products, and this type of product in particular.
This is very bad, WD! Are your other products also vulnerable in this way? Why should anyone ever again trust your company to keep their data safe?
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago> Why should anyone ever again trust your company to keep their data safe? Because if you need a hard drive, your options are pretty much Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba, and they've all had their own problems.
- R0b0t1 5y agoSeagate mitigated their most famous problems. They were a good bargain buy for a while after that as they tried to rebuild their brand. Issue is now they're too proud of themselves, you're better off buying something else. They might still be the cheapest per GB for certain sizes, just look at the backblaze stats.
- cortesoft 5y agoWhat does "too proud of themselves" mean?
- broknbottle 5y agoSeagate Exos drives are solid. All of HDD drives intended for consumers are 1 year warranty bottom of the barrel shit
- chris11 5y agoOne option is shucking a high capacity external. Those are more likely to be high quality. Some are rebranded enterprise drives. But the hd model isn't guaranteed, and warranty support might be iffy.
- em-bee 5y agofor my raid i try to buy disks from different manufacturers. with the limited selection this is extremely hard. i have to fall back to different models from the same manufacturer and even buying the same model from different shops to get at least disks from a different batch.
- willis936 5y agoYou forget HGST. They have a longer track record of reliable models than any other manufacturer, even taking the death star into account.
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoHGST was bought by Western Digital.
- manigandham 5y agoHGST was acquired by WD in 2012 and stopped being a brand altogether in 2018.
- linsomniac 5y agoA sad, sad day. :-/
- polpo 5y agoAs a part of the sale of HGST to WD, Toshiba got assets to produce 3.5” hard drives from HGST. I’d consider them the true heirs of HGST, and their good reliability as shown in Backblaze’s studies bear that out.
- ksec 5y ago> stopped being a brand altogether in 2018. Unless WD changed their mind again, HGST HDD is still available as of 2021 because customer has been demanding the exact same HDD with exact same model number from the exact same plant. Basically they want to know it is the same old HGST and not WD. And some ( if not most ) of them are large, enterprise customers. So they brought it back in ~2019 (without an announcement).
- numpad0 5y agoThat’s the official stance from WD public relations but HGST labeled drives are still being manufactured.
- temp8964 5y agoAren't HGST drives also the most expensive ones?
- ExtraE 5y agoI’m confused by the edit- WD is Western Digital, no?
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoSorry, you caught me before my newer edit. My brain was doing something stupid. (And I need to go to bed.) Edit: To be clear, it was my mistake, my post made no sense before I fixed it. The parent doesn't deserve the downvotes.
- adolph 5y agoThe affected model here, known as My Book Live, uses an ethernet cable to connect to a local network. From there, users can remotely access their files and make configuration changes through Western Digital cloud infrastructure. Western Digital discontinued the My Book Live in 2015. The support forum thread was first reported by Bleeping Computer. The affected product is not a drive but a NAS solution. In terms of being a reasonable consumer my thought process is to evaluate distinctive products differently. NAS is a cheap computer with attached drives. It’s going to have computer-like failure modes.
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoWell, the GP said "why should anyone ever again trust [Western Digital] to keep their data safe?" Using a Western Digital hard drive, internet connected or not, very much means trusting a WD product with your data. But I might be reading too literally. And personally, I do intend to continue purchasing Western Digital hard drives, just nothing internet connected, because I agree they're different products with different risks.
- ghostly_s 5y agoNon-technical users don't care about this distinction. The name Western Digital is on both, and that name's brand value is destroyed forever if this indeed turns out to be irreversible. Though they could probably pivot to selling their drives in other's NAS devices without much difficulty if they want to remain in this market.
- mastazi 5y agoThe issue at hand is a NAS firmware problem, not a HD drive issue. There are quite a few other brands offering NAS devices e.g. Synology, QNAP, Thecus, Pegasus and more.
- Scoundreller 5y agoPublic-facing Synology devices got hit in the past too, but they just used it to mine Litecoin. I think someone calculated it and figured out that it cost something like $400k in electricity to mine $100k of coins on the boxes. Aha! It was $600k in dogecoin in 2014 https://www.pcworld.com/article/2364120/hacked-synology-nas-systems-used-in-highprofit-cryptocurrency-mining-operation.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/2364120/hacked-synology-nas-... That’s worth around $125m today (assuming straight hodling).
- ValentineC 5y agoSynology has a large enough following to get its own ransomware attack (in July 2019) too: https://www.synology.com/en-us/company/news/article/2019JulyRansomware https://www.synology.com/en-us/company/news/article/2019July...
- ksec 5y agoAnd of course Qnap in the recent month. It keeps repeating, and keeps happening, and some ( me ) keep ranting about it and no one / company is doing anything much with it. Majority of people buy NAS only use it to access their Data within their internal network. But somehow they all include Internet / Cloud features as upsell.
- achow 5y agoAnd Samsung. Using 500GB SSD for many years as an external backup.
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoSamsung only makes SSD's though, right? It's fine if you don't have that much data, but past a certain size you're paying a lot extra.
- flyinghamster 5y agoThey used to make hard drives years ago, and I still have three old 1.5 TB units kicking around that I can't seem to throw out, because they won't die.
- mapt 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_hard_disk_manufacturers#/media/File:Diagram_of_Hard_Disk_Drive_Manufacturer_Consolidation.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_hard_disk_manu...
- tomcooks 5y agoThe problem is the IoT not the drive
- tomnipotent 5y ago> Because if you need a hard drive This is the third such major scandal from WD in as many years. First, selling SMR drives as CMR. Second, selling 7200RPM drives as 5400RPM. Now this. They've lost a lot of credibility, and I don't see any of the other manufacturers having issues rivaling WD.
- roblabla 5y ago> selling 7200RPM drives as 5400RPM I suppose you mean the other way around? Otherwise, what's the problem with selling a higher RPM device as a lower one? Isn't higher RPM better? (Genuine question, I don't know much about HDD).
- sascha_sl 5y agoNo, right way around. Less noise and usually higher durability. WD cut down the number of real SKUs and then slowed down a 7200 RPM drive in firmware calling them "5400rpm class"
- tomnipotent 5y ago> Isn't higher RPM better WD Red is marketed for NAS/storage, where it's not uncommon to have 4/8/12/16 drives in the same chassis where noise/heat becomes a very different problem. It turns out that the drives generated the same heat and consumed the same power as 7200RPM drives, while the data sheets were outright lies and BS. WD decided on double down on the BS for several months, and only recently released new SKUs where the specs matched the marketing.
- numpad0 5y agoIt’s correct, and higher is better, 7K2 is faster and often longer lasting somehow. Generally better built. Downsides are noise, power draw and thermal. They sourced drives from former HGST under WD but 5K4 we’re not available so marketing rebadged 7K2 as “5400rpm-class” and lucky buyers were hit with better performances.
- tomnipotent 5y ago
- 3np 5y agoWhat did Toshiba do? I find them the most trustable in this range. (Not that I would put anything like this past them; Japanese companies are notorious for leaving ancient buggy software at EoL)
- mrtweetyhack 5y agowho else do you go with where you won't run in to the same problem?
- nextlevelwizard 5y agoAs it happens I went with my own solution just yesterday. It has no fancy web UI or app connectivity it is literally a Linux box with SMB share on it. The drive happens to be Toshiba, but that is just a medium
- WalterBright 5y agoYou should trust anything connected to the internet. Demand a physical write-enable switch from your backup drive vendor.
- cortesoft 5y agoA physical write enable switch? My computer is doing automatic hourly backups, how is that going to work?
- kortilla 5y agoA small robotic arm to flip the switch, duh.
- zadokshi 5y agoAs long as they small robotic arm is not also connected to the internet or the WD NAS
- xvector 5y agoHmm, append-only delta writes?
- WalterBright 5y agoIt works on your backup drive so when you try to restore from the backup, the ransomware on your system can't encrypt it.
- cortesoft 5y agoBut how do I write backup data to the drive without having to slip a switch every hour?
- WalterBright 5y agoVerify that your previous backup drive is readable before writing to the next backup drive. But hey, if you just got a ransomware note, and think "I'm good, I have my backups!", wouldn't you want to flip the read-only switch before plugging in those backup drives? I would. In fact, I'd flip that switch always before trying to read from a backup drive.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- lrem 5y agoAfter using exclusively WD for some decades I've seen the WD Red fiasco[1] and decided to not use WD any more. [1]: https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/14/wd-red-nas-drives-shingled-magnetic-recording/ https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/14/wd-red-nas-drives-shin...
- nacs 5y agoWhat are you using now? Seagate is the other big consumer brand and they also have their own set of issues. Anecdotally, I've had multiple Seagate drives die within a year or 2 whereas WD ones have kept going for years longer.
- Nexxxeh 5y agoToshiba is the remaining option. I don't end up getting through many drives a year, but N300 and above are my go-to drives now for NAS, NVR etc.
- lrem 5y agoSeagate's anecdotal failure rate was why I kept to WD. Backblaze's numbers convinced me this is not a problem I need to worry about in the present. Seagate had much better price/performance than Toshiba in my local market when I last needed drives, so it's what I got.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- stef25 5y agoConnecting a hard drive directly to the internet is probably never a good idea.
- figassis 5y agoI am afraid to buy WD drives since the mid 2000s. I used to store all my media in them, and with WD every 1 to 2 years, my drive would be corrupted to the point that it’d need formatting. Having to rebuild my collections multiple, with always “improved” WD models moved me away from them forever. I don’t even buy server grade WDs.
- GuB-42 5y agoThere are a limited number of hard drive manufacturers. All of them had reliability issues at some point. Like the IBM "deathstar" and the Seagate "failacuda", I don't know about an equivalent from WD. Reliability come and go, and you don't even know when you buy because problems can take years to develop, and it is dependent on usage. Backblaze does a survey every quarter, here is the latest one https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1-2021/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1... They are all in the same ballpark, with Seagate a bit worse than the others but not terrible like it was a few years ago. WD tends to be consistently in the middle of the pack. The latest fail from WD (as a hard drive manufacturer) was when they sneaked inadequate SMR technology into "red" consumer-grade NAS drives. But others did more or less the same. Now, all manufacturers are transparent about the technology used and newer "red plus" drives from WD are CMR. So I'd say, for now, I'd say WD is as good (or as bad) as any other and I would let price decide. For reliability, that's what RAID is for. And in any case, RAID or not, and no matter how reliable your disks are, if your data is precious, you need backups too.
- swiley 5y ago>But, this will certainly give me pause when considering WD products I'd hope it gives you some pause when considering "cloud" products as well, that was the reason I avoided this.
- dubya 5y agoMine is still prompting me to register my device. It's been a secondary Time Machine backup for 10+(?) years, but really is too slow to ever do a restore from. This is a good reminder to replace it.