3 ms·

Western Digital NAS drives flash ‘warning’ after 3 years even if nothing’s wrong

47 points by LopRabbit 3y ago

xethos 3y ago
What makes this worse is, AFAIK, HDDs follow the bathtub curve for failure rates. Did it fail in the first 6-8 months? No? Then it's likely good for most of a decade, at least (barring nothing egregious like physical abuse). Western Digital continues to justify my stance of "Don't buy WD".
- sp332 3y ago
  They have a 5-year warranty! (The Red Pro ones do at least.) And this failure mode makes it impossible to rebuild a degraded array if you have one of these drives in that's 4 years old.
  - AndrewDavis 3y ago
    Warranties vary based on line. I bought a Red Plus drive last week and it is 3 years, the blue is 2 years.
  - sidewndr46 3y ago
    Having dealt with WD's warranty process once, I pledged myself never to deal with that again. After dealing with a broken web-form, I got charged $380 for a non-existent warranty replacement drive. When I disputed the charge on my credit card, I got a phone call from some mid-level executive who apparently was pissed their number was given as a point of contact. When I tried to explain the problem, they insisted I owed them $20 for returning the drive "late". Probably the worst technology company I have ever dealt with.
- willis936 3y ago
  I have had a dozen hard drives and nearly half of them failed within 5 years. I would not consider hard drives safe for a decade of use. SSDs are likely much better.
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    opposite experience here.. set the sleep to a reasonable value, keep the temperatures and power stable, and the better quality spinning disks (7200rpm) are great. I have had three SSDs fail without warning in the same time period, supposedly better quality SSDs.
    - xhkkffbf 3y ago
      Me too. Flash is a great technology, but it tends to forget things, especially if there's no power applied to it.
      - willis936 3y ago
        That's fine, but online MTBF is much shorter for hard drives than flash. If you don't use your computers then hard drives make for better cold storage.
  - hulitu 3y ago
    I have drives from 2008 and 2011 which are still going fine.(WD black, and Samsung)
elmerfud 3y ago
This sounds like a mix of problems to me but mostly with Synology. Sure drives have built in thresholds and 3 years seems short to be but mostly this seems to be Synology and less so with WD. I have 8 WD Red NAS drives that I pulled out of service with 4.5 years of power on hours. There was no smart warning for power on hours. I have 8 other WD Red NAS drives running 5 years and again no smart threshold for power on time. Of course I'm not running Synology. This almost seems like Synology is playing the enterprise SAN/NAS game of wanting you to toss your hardware every 3 years. Maybe there's a little be of fault here with WD but if so it's because that's what Synology wanted and not a issue with WD NAS drives.
- guraf 3y ago
  The alert isn't raised by traditional SMART, it's done by WDDA [1] and my understanding is that it's not controlled by Synology. You could still blame Synology for supporting WDDA, if you really wanted to shift blame I guess. 1. https://www.westerndigital.com/en-ca/solutions/device-analytics https://www.westerndigital.com/en-ca/solutions/device-analyt...
  - theluketaylor 3y ago
    In fact synology’s response was to start ignoring WDDA, so they removed themselves from the situation.
frontier 3y ago
Engineered obsolescence before the warranty even runs out, well played WD! /s
greatgib 3y ago
In this story, it is also interesting to see that the hard to fix annoyance is caused by WDDA. Again a crappy proprietary solution of WD. Instead of using standards...
ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLGi8sPLkLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLGi8sPLkLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lss7t6BZ5KY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lss7t6BZ5KY

47 points by LopRabbit 3y ago

What makes this worse is, AFAIK, HDDs follow the bathtub curve for failure rates. Did it fail in the first 6-8 months? No? Then it's likely good for most of a decade, at least (barring nothing egregious like physical abuse). Western Digital continues to justify my stance of "Don't buy WD".

sp332 3y ago
They have a 5-year warranty! (The Red Pro ones do at least.) And this failure mode makes it impossible to rebuild a degraded array if you have one of these drives in that's 4 years old.
- AndrewDavis 3y ago
  Warranties vary based on line. I bought a Red Plus drive last week and it is 3 years, the blue is 2 years.
- sidewndr46 3y ago
  Having dealt with WD's warranty process once, I pledged myself never to deal with that again. After dealing with a broken web-form, I got charged $380 for a non-existent warranty replacement drive. When I disputed the charge on my credit card, I got a phone call from some mid-level executive who apparently was pissed their number was given as a point of contact. When I tried to explain the problem, they insisted I owed them $20 for returning the drive "late". Probably the worst technology company I have ever dealt with.
willis936 3y ago
I have had a dozen hard drives and nearly half of them failed within 5 years. I would not consider hard drives safe for a decade of use. SSDs are likely much better.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  opposite experience here.. set the sleep to a reasonable value, keep the temperatures and power stable, and the better quality spinning disks (7200rpm) are great. I have had three SSDs fail without warning in the same time period, supposedly better quality SSDs.
  - xhkkffbf 3y ago
    Me too. Flash is a great technology, but it tends to forget things, especially if there's no power applied to it.
    - willis936 3y ago
      That's fine, but online MTBF is much shorter for hard drives than flash. If you don't use your computers then hard drives make for better cold storage.
- hulitu 3y ago
  I have drives from 2008 and 2011 which are still going fine.(WD black, and Samsung)

elmerfud 3y ago

This sounds like a mix of problems to me but mostly with Synology. Sure drives have built in thresholds and 3 years seems short to be but mostly this seems to be Synology and less so with WD. I have 8 WD Red NAS drives that I pulled out of service with 4.5 years of power on hours. There was no smart warning for power on hours. I have 8 other WD Red NAS drives running 5 years and again no smart threshold for power on time. Of course I'm not running Synology. This almost seems like Synology is playing the enterprise SAN/NAS game of wanting you to toss your hardware every 3 years. Maybe there's a little be of fault here with WD but if so it's because that's what Synology wanted and not a issue with WD NAS drives.

guraf 3y ago
The alert isn't raised by traditional SMART, it's done by WDDA [1] and my understanding is that it's not controlled by Synology. You could still blame Synology for supporting WDDA, if you really wanted to shift blame I guess. 1. https://www.westerndigital.com/en-ca/solutions/device-analytics https://www.westerndigital.com/en-ca/solutions/device-analyt...
- theluketaylor 3y ago
  In fact synology’s response was to start ignoring WDDA, so they removed themselves from the situation.

frontier 3y ago

Engineered obsolescence before the warranty even runs out, well played WD! /s

greatgib 3y ago

In this story, it is also interesting to see that the hard to fix annoyance is caused by WDDA. Again a crappy proprietary solution of WD. Instead of using standards...

ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLGi8sPLkLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLGi8sPLkLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lss7t6BZ5KY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lss7t6BZ5KY