- Aug 25, 2001
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Question BEWARE! WD NAS drives only good for 3 years of PoH! (According to WDDA service - DISABLE on NAS if possible.)
- Thread starter VirtualLarry
- Start date
Kind of like the US gov study that found numerous pharmaceuticals, if properly stored, are just fine many years after their expiration dates = more sales!
Red Squirrel
No Lifer
Welp, wish I knew this like, a month or so ago! What a dirty move to do. Just encouraging e-waste like he said.
The old drives I pulled from one of the arrays were 10 years old and still working fine, I just needed more disk space.
Hopefully this won't affect me in any way though as it sounds like this is a proprietary analytics tool and not smart data. But nothing would stop them from causing smart data to start showing fake errors, or actually causing the drive to just cease to work after a certain amount of years. Looks like they're trying to build in planned obsolescence into their drives.
The old drives I pulled from one of the arrays were 10 years old and still working fine, I just needed more disk space.
Hopefully this won't affect me in any way though as it sounds like this is a proprietary analytics tool and not smart data. But nothing would stop them from causing smart data to start showing fake errors, or actually causing the drive to just cease to work after a certain amount of years. Looks like they're trying to build in planned obsolescence into their drives.
Topical
Why millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed
If such a device does not already exist, it should be trivial to produce a pluggable device with embedded controller that has no interface other than data cable connecting to the disk and power input, that will use a fully vetted open source firmware image that cannot be written to after leaving the manufacturer, to plug into a disk and 'cleanse' it of data by overwriting every LBA 0 - 255 with either zeros or pseudorandom data. When finished it could write to disk an encrypted signature that is hashed from or containing the drive make, model, serial, and uuid to indicate it has been successfully wiped, which can be read by the device if someone wanted to do a 2nd verification. There could be other security features to ward off tampering or counterfeiting. Or other features that could transmit the log to a server for record-keeping.
I cannot imagine such a device costing more than $20 when commissioned in sufficient quantities. You could have a model each for doing two or up to 16 drives at a time. Why do companies not want to do this in-house?? The drives have more resale value on the 2nd hand market than as salvage.
Why millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed
If such a device does not already exist, it should be trivial to produce a pluggable device with embedded controller that has no interface other than data cable connecting to the disk and power input, that will use a fully vetted open source firmware image that cannot be written to after leaving the manufacturer, to plug into a disk and 'cleanse' it of data by overwriting every LBA 0 - 255 with either zeros or pseudorandom data. When finished it could write to disk an encrypted signature that is hashed from or containing the drive make, model, serial, and uuid to indicate it has been successfully wiped, which can be read by the device if someone wanted to do a 2nd verification. There could be other security features to ward off tampering or counterfeiting. Or other features that could transmit the log to a server for record-keeping.
I cannot imagine such a device costing more than $20 when commissioned in sufficient quantities. You could have a model each for doing two or up to 16 drives at a time. Why do companies not want to do this in-house?? The drives have more resale value on the 2nd hand market than as salvage.
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Red Squirrel
No Lifer
I kind of get destroying drives for data security reasons, but reality is they could be more sensible about it. If you break a raid 5 for example, destroy 2 drives, zero out and sell the rest. No usable data will be available, especially if the drives are split up to different people over ebay etc. Or even better, wipe them all, keep 2 drives in storage, sell rest, sell the 2 later down the line. The odds of someone managing to reconstruct the data even in a coordinated effort to try to buy all the same drives would be ridiculously small.
Me personally I always just repurpose drives towards backups. If a drive fails, only then do I destroy it if it's out of warranty. For backups it might be an idea to encrypt the drives too. Even if you keep the password in a not so secure location like built right into the backup script, it will at least make a lone drive outside of it's environment in the wrong hands basically unreadable.
Me personally I always just repurpose drives towards backups. If a drive fails, only then do I destroy it if it's out of warranty. For backups it might be an idea to encrypt the drives too. Even if you keep the password in a not so secure location like built right into the backup script, it will at least make a lone drive outside of it's environment in the wrong hands basically unreadable.
WD seems hell bent on becoming the scum of storage manufacturers. I say it's the blasted Sandisk cockroaches that have made their way up the WD corporate ladder and now filling their coffers at the expense of the company's reputation.
Seems so far only applicable to those using Synology equipment? I didn't read either but it's shorter than the video:
“Clearly predatory”: Western Digital sparks panic, anger for age-shaming HDDs
Drives automatically get a “warning” flag if powered on for 3 years.
arstechnica.com
Red Squirrel
No Lifer
Yeah sounds like this is something that may not be an issue if you use mdadm, or even zfs. Though the part that does worry me is the fact that they are sneaking SMR drives as NAS drives... Wonder if there is a way to test if a drive is SMR or not. Sometimes it's advertised on the listing on the retailer's site but sometimes it's not.
- Sep 28, 2005
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Better then seagate...
Warrenty starts from a couple months AFTER the manufactor date... not your purchase date.
This is why friends don't ever recommend friends to buy Seagate.
Edit: why did AT scan that as german?
If you R5 Spinners this day and age... oh boy oh boy oh boy....
The big Rhino wearing the URE shirt is ready to charge at you.
Oh man... isn't that like disabling to odometer on a salvage title car?
Warrenty starts from a couple months AFTER the manufactor date... not your purchase date.
Seagate Limited Warranty | Seagate US
Information on Seagate's limited warranty for consumer products.
www.seagate.com
This is why friends don't ever recommend friends to buy Seagate.
Edit: why did AT scan that as german?
If you R5 Spinners this day and age... oh boy oh boy oh boy....
The big Rhino wearing the URE shirt is ready to charge at you.
Oh man... isn't that like disabling to odometer on a salvage title car?
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Red Squirrel
No Lifer
Better then seagate...
Warrenty starts from a couple months AFTER the manufactor date... not your purchase date.
Seagate Limited Warranty | Seagate US
Information on Seagate's limited warranty for consumer products.www.seagate.com
This is why friends don't ever recommend friends to buy Seagate.
Edit: why did AT scan that as german?
Kind of sucks that they're both playing nasty games. Between WD and Seagate there is not much choice left. Pretty sure WD owns Toshiba and Hitachi's HDD line too. What else is left after that?
- Sep 28, 2005
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Pretty much SOL..
I still stand by HGST.... but i dont really use Reds anymore.
I realized they cost about as much as Golds, and Golds / DC HC are Helium drives which i feel are way better anyhow in long term data center type environments.
There is. Just write a large number of small files to a drive. Then run some command to update them, like:
copy 1.txt >> file1.txt (windows command. not sure what is done in linux for appending one file to an existing file)
That would be atrociously slow on an SMR drive, because it has to read the file from the overlapped tracks, then write back to them, which would mean reading the upper track into cache, writing the changes to the track below it and then covering that track up with the track from the cache (very simplified description of what happens in SMR).
I believe this is just a Synology DSM thing, but I could be wrong. It's kinda ironic that Synology is diverting blame to WDC; in recent years Synology is getting aggressive at limiting some of the drives that you can run in some of its NAS systems. They even go so far as to re-brand Seagate drives as their own, and brag that they have customized the firmware. Of course their certified first-party parts generally cost more than aftermarket parts. Maybe that's fine for businesses (i.e. paying more for enterprise drives), but it's lousy for consumers.
Besides Seagate and WDC, Toshiba still has a hard drive division. For now.
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Hail The Brain Slug
Diamond Member
- Oct 10, 2005
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This guy sounds super ignorant, and also he's rephrasing to drive a "WD evil" point. His actual quote is "In their own words, the user should replace the drive soon". He didn't even highlight the correct flag he was complaining about.
This doesn't say that. It says the user MIGHT CONSIDER replacing the drive soon. If you want 24/7 uptime with minimized risk of downtime or failure, yeah. You might consider that. I'd wager most datacenters probably have their own replacement schedule for drives. They definitely don't just run every drive until they fail.
This in no way seems like WD strongarming people into replacing drives early. It's literally just a flag that says the drive has more than 3 years of power on time. It really seems like DSM's problem that it reads the flag and masks any other warnings.
Edit: I finished watching the second video. The guy clearly has his mind made up and cannot be changed, despite receiving what seemed like completely reasonable reply from Synology. He's decided WD is the devil and no amount of reason is going to stop him.
He's making all kinds of assumptions, inferences, and more and presenting them confidently as if they are fact.
This is not the kind of techtuber we need.
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That will certainly not fly within the EU for consumer use. Manufacturers are required to offer 2 years worth of warranty, starting at the date of purchase. Seagate can ***** all they want, they're not getting around that.
We have pretty strong consumer protection.
Red Squirrel
No Lifer
The fact that WD is basically telling you that the drive should be replaced after 3 years is still pretty concerning and piss poor business practice though. It can be taken 2 ways. 1: it's nothing, and just a cheap way to try to make more sales, ignore it. Or 2: they have such low confidence their drive will last longer, and it might actually fail soon.
Hail The Brain Slug
Diamond Member
- Oct 10, 2005
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WD is doing no such thing. You have to run an OS that supports WDDA and manually enable it in order to receive the additional data it provides. If you are getting this warning, you knowingly chose to enable this. If you don't understand what the additional telemetry from the drives means, that's your ignorance. Synology even said there's a setting to disable this specific warning from the drives if you have enabled WDDA and don't want to see it.
Edit: a 3 year power on hour cycle for drive replacement in critical installations is supported by industry data.
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- Aug 25, 2001
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If WD *truely* believes that their "NAS" drives will only hold up 24/7 for three years, then that is sub-standard for the industry, and they should NO LONGER be considered as a drive vendor, IMHO.
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They want you to buy enterprise class drives, as it makes more money.
Im sure Gold's and DC HC's do not follow any of the commercial class nonsense.
Hail The Brain Slug
Diamond Member
- Oct 10, 2005
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Here we go, ignoring the industry analytics and all arguments made here. It's a voluntary alert your drive has hit 3 years power on hours, nothing more.
- Sep 28, 2005
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No its bricking Synology NAS's tho, by not letting you use them in rebuilds.
Read tcsenter's comment here.
Seems so far only applicable to those using Synology equipment? I didn't read either but it's shorter than the video:
“Clearly predatory”: Western Digital sparks panic, anger for age-shaming HDDs
Drives automatically get a “warning” flag if powered on for 3 years.
Personally its quite big as Synology is a premium NAS, and a company i trust way more then QNAP even which gets hacked and ransomware once a month, because idiots at QNAP are probably all hackers to begin with.
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