If WD expects its drives to fail after 3 years, then WD is manufacturing shoddy products and it’s time to change vendors.
Which is a real shame, because WD was until recently the gold standard of disk drive reliability. To my recollection, I’ve never seen a WD drive fail.
I’ve got a machine whose (Seagate, not WD) drives have been powered on for 14 years and they still aren’t complaining. They’re about to, though—their SMART reports only 1% service life left!
I have a 13 year old 1tb WD mypassport that I loaded up with pirated movies and took with me to Afghanistan. It’s been through a lot, and it’s still working well today, not even a blip of an issue. Such a shame when companies drop off in quality.
Which is a real shame, because WD was until recently the gold standard of disk drive reliability. To my recollection, I’ve never seen a WD drive fail.
Oh boy, I’ve had about 10 drive failures out of like 46 drives, all WD. I’ve had 3 WD Red Pro 6TBs fail and 7 WD Red 6TBs fail. This has been over around 7 or so years, although one of the WD Red Pro 6TB drives was bought this year and failed within 2 weeks (over 1000 bad sectors, it had the worst SMART stats I’d ever seen).
The WD Red 6TBs are particularly bad, I’ve had better luck with the WD Red Pro 6TBs, and then IIRC the WD Red 3TBs are like by far the worst out of WD’s Reds.
Not to mention, WD already tried pulling a fast one on customers when they swapped out WD Red drives with SMR drives then had to make a WD Red Plus for their (existing) CMR Red drives. I had a WD Red 6TB drive go bad, replaced it with a brand new WD Red Plus 6TB which immediately went bad, then replaced it with a WD Red Pro 6TB which also went bad within a few days. I replaced that one once again with a brand new WD Red Pro 6TB (I love brick and mortar PC stores, I got an awesome PC store near me) and that drive has been perfectly fine for a few months. My original WD Red 6TB drive in question did last me like, 6 or 7 years, I just got really unlucky with two quick failures in a row but all is good now.
I’ve not had a great experience with WD, but I’ve still heard worse things so I am sticking with my WD Red Pro 6TBs for now.
Everyone has at least one bad story about a brand, and that experience can colour a consumer’s view indefinitely. I had a faulty WD drive in the computer I got to start college in 1997 but didn’t realize it, instead learning to reinstall Windows every six weeks. I rarely chose WD thereafter.
Everyone has a bad story about a brand for sure, not every brand takes a NAS quality, NAS branded drive they charge a premium for because it’s suitable for NAS and switches the underlying tech to something that’s fundamentally unsuitable for NAS applications. Then lies about it. Fuck WD.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
Profit making as intended
It infuriating that companies talk about sustainability to boost their branding while designing their products with planned obsolescence.
I mean at that point, buying WD is asking to be shit on. Member that CMR/SMR fiasco some years ago? Yeah you shoulda boycotted em at that point
For real. I’ve been happily running Seagate since then. If you’re still buying WD it’s kinda on you.
Further, you can’t repair a pool with a drive marked with a warning label.
“Only drives with a healthy status can be used to repair or expand a storage pool,” Synology’s spokesperson said. “Users will need to first suppress the warning or disable WDDA to continue.”
That sounds pretty terrible. I’ve had great luck with seagate and I think I even have a seagate drive. My Drives are all 6+ years old, except for 2 which are a bit newer and I have some drives I bough second hand super cheap. They may be 2 ish years old as well.
I hope WD reverses this decision. There’s no reason to replace a drive after 3 years if there’s no issues.
That might backfire on WD. I wonder if people will be posting pics of successive warnings like a trophy. Like sometime posting screenshots of router uptimes.
When I see long uptimes, my first and pretty much only thought is of unpatched vulnerabilities.
Eh, depends on the purpose of the device and what it’s running. Many Linux/Unix kernels don’t need reboot to restart services after updates.
I long while back (~15 years) there was a bit of a fiasco with Seagate drives. It had to do with firmware bricking some drives if I’m not mistaken. I was affect by this and didn’t have redundancy back then. I swore Seagate off from then on.
Recently WD had the SMR situation where they had to come clean about it and now this.
I feel like no mater who you go with, they try to screw you either way. That or maybe just go with Toshiba. Haven’t tried those yet. I’m not running a Synology anymore so that messaging won’t affect me, but it’s still annoying to know that it’s part of their business practices.
Ah yes…the ever popular trend of chasing positive financial results, no matter how temporary, at the cost of everything else even if ‘everything’ includes negative financial results in the long term. Brilliant!
Wow. My homeserver drives generally last me 5-8 years before I replace them. Can’t imagine getting nag dialogs after 3…
With mirrored storage spaces / raid10, who really cares if a single drive dies?
