Western Digital Warned Users For NAS Drives’ Condition By Simply Having 3 Years Of Uptime
Western Digital Warned Users For NAS Drives’ Condition By Simply Having 3 Years Of Uptime
Imagine you’re in your late 20s. Some kid on the street saw you call you an old uncle, even though you’re not – that’s essentially what Western Digital is doing against its NAS drives users in what looks like an attempt to convince their users to buy a new one prematurely. Or in other words, planned obsolescence.
Users of Synology has reported that WD’s drives will flag a warning in the DiskStation Manger (DSM) software as soon as the power-on time reaches 3 years – regardless of whether an actual error (i.e. bad sectors or critical SMART warnings) are present. This warning is generated from a slightly different system called Western Digital Device Analytics (WDDA), though it is believed that WDDA uses existing values from SMART sensors for some of its functionality while providing little on its own.
Synology has clarified to Ars Technica that warnings are generated on WD’s part, not their software. “WDDA monitoring and testing subsystem is developed by Western Digital, including the warning after they reach a certain number of power-on-hours,” said their spokesperson. Given that NAS drives are commonly designed for long hours of operations and by design can be used for many years beyond, the 3-year warning got users – such as YouTuber SpaceRex – particularly angry.
According to the YouTuber-plus-tech-consultant, the 3-year warning flag has in fact managed to panicked one of its clients and prompted them to swap the “problematic” drives, fearing the risk of losing business-critical data. He goes on and slams the company in the video: “It is clearly predatory tactics by Western Digital trying to sell more hard drives.”
So why is the 3-year warning an issue? Turns out, the warning flagged by WDDA will mask any actual errors such as uncorrected or bad sectors, and WD can simply dismiss it as the drive being “too old” to operate. Note that some drives affected have warranty exactly 3 years long, though others go as long as 5 years – meaning you’ll get WDDA’s warning for no practical reason before warranty even runs out.
This is far from the first time WD has gotten themselves into hot waters. The recent, high-profile incidents include WD My Cloud locking users out due to breach, pulling a bait-and-switch on WD Red NAS drives to use cheaper but slower, less reliable SMR (shingled magnetic recording) technology instead of the NAS-standard CMR (conventional magnetic recording) tech. Subsidiary brand SanDisk also sees its portable Extreme SSDs failing en masse, with only limited fixes provided.
Source: Ars Technica
Pokdepinion: Uptime by itself shouldn’t be a metric of a drive’s health – just like you wouldn’t call a person sick even if they’re still healthy in their 50s or 60s.
