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“Clearly predatory”: Western Digital sparks panic, anger for age-shaming HDDs

45 points by mfiguiere 3y ago

donmcronald 3y ago
Nothing screams quality like a big warning saying the product shouldn’t be relied on for more than 3 years. Why should i buy one of these low quality drives that only lasts 3 years?
PebblesHD 3y ago
If a drive warrantied for 5 years begins showing warnings and refusing a rebuild in a cluster due to the manufacturer at only 3, that should qualify for warranty replacement no? Even if it wasn’t, consumer law in places like Australia include a layman's test for reasonable lifetime for statutory warranty coverage which likely covers the same. This doesn’t sound like a very well thought through idea…
- ipython 3y ago
  Of course not. But for a low price of $8 per month per drive you can subscribe to the new WD+ service, which will remove those pesky warnings, unlock your drives performance for streaming workloads, and give your management a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that your storage is protected. /s (or is it?)
firstlink 3y ago
It would have been better to run the headline, "WD advises customers of maximum 3 yr lifespan of NAS drives".
crmrc114 3y ago
Stopped buying WD years ago when they went to the Skittles marketing and after a number of worthless green drive failures. My raid arrays all use segate drives. The exos line has been pretty solid. Segate has their own problems, not saying the are perfect.
- autoexec 3y ago
  For most of my life the choice for most people has been either Seagate/maxtor or WD. What is it about the hard drive market that we have no real competitors, just a duopoly of manufacturers who both have a long history of badly designed products and screwing over consumers.
- sentientslug 3y ago
  I’m not sure you can comment on WD drive quality if you use Seagate….
heelix 3y ago
Of all the drives you would expect long, long life from - you would figure the RED series would be it. I just realized my box of Theseus is still rocking 15 year old velociraptors as part of a 6 year old threadripper. Oh how they have fallen.
pbnjeh 3y ago
Recently discovered I'm going to have to boot into a DOS environment in order to use a utility, that I had to ferret out of old web pages, to change the IDLE3 setting on some Easystores I have, in order to stop them from aggressively parking their heads and spinning down after a couple dozen seconds of idle time. For the sake of "power savings", these drives seem determined to eat themselves if you don't just perform one sustained bout of access and then disconnect them and put then on a shelf until next week, when you do exactly the same. WD, F this setting. And double F not documenting it and supporting a straightforward way to change it. P.S. Someone wrote a Linux based utility for this, 10+ years ago, that is still on Sourceforge, but I didn't find much confirmation as to whether it works correctly.

45 points by mfiguiere 3y ago

Nothing screams quality like a big warning saying the product shouldn’t be relied on for more than 3 years. Why should i buy one of these low quality drives that only lasts 3 years?

PebblesHD 3y ago

If a drive warrantied for 5 years begins showing warnings and refusing a rebuild in a cluster due to the manufacturer at only 3, that should qualify for warranty replacement no? Even if it wasn’t, consumer law in places like Australia include a layman's test for reasonable lifetime for statutory warranty coverage which likely covers the same. This doesn’t sound like a very well thought through idea…

ipython 3y ago
Of course not. But for a low price of $8 per month per drive you can subscribe to the new WD+ service, which will remove those pesky warnings, unlock your drives performance for streaming workloads, and give your management a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that your storage is protected. /s (or is it?)

firstlink 3y ago

It would have been better to run the headline, "WD advises customers of maximum 3 yr lifespan of NAS drives".

crmrc114 3y ago

Stopped buying WD years ago when they went to the Skittles marketing and after a number of worthless green drive failures. My raid arrays all use segate drives. The exos line has been pretty solid. Segate has their own problems, not saying the are perfect.

autoexec 3y ago
For most of my life the choice for most people has been either Seagate/maxtor or WD. What is it about the hard drive market that we have no real competitors, just a duopoly of manufacturers who both have a long history of badly designed products and screwing over consumers.
sentientslug 3y ago
I’m not sure you can comment on WD drive quality if you use Seagate….

heelix 3y ago

Of all the drives you would expect long, long life from - you would figure the RED series would be it. I just realized my box of Theseus is still rocking 15 year old velociraptors as part of a 6 year old threadripper. Oh how they have fallen.

pbnjeh 3y ago

Recently discovered I'm going to have to boot into a DOS environment in order to use a utility, that I had to ferret out of old web pages, to change the IDLE3 setting on some Easystores I have, in order to stop them from aggressively parking their heads and spinning down after a couple dozen seconds of idle time. For the sake of "power savings", these drives seem determined to eat themselves if you don't just perform one sustained bout of access and then disconnect them and put then on a shelf until next week, when you do exactly the same. WD, F this setting. And double F not documenting it and supporting a straightforward way to change it. P.S. Someone wrote a Linux based utility for this, 10+ years ago, that is still on Sourceforge, but I didn't find much confirmation as to whether it works correctly.