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

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759368/western-digital-three-years-warning-synology-nas

by LopRabbit • 3 years ago

47 15 3 years ago

xethos• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

willis9362• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

hulitu• 3 years ago

I have drives from 2008 and 2011 which are still going fine.(WD black, and Samsung)

elmerfud• 3 years 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• 3 years 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-analyt...

theluketaylor• 3 years ago

In fact synology’s response was to start ignoring WDDA, so they removed themselves from the situation.

frontier• 3 years ago

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

greatgib• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

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

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

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

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