Avoid wester digital red hard drives.

Says in the video that their stupid decision to automatically flag drives as in "warning" condition just for being powered on for 3 years means that the monthly health status check that a Synology NAS will give you will always show the drives as in Warning from that point onwards, nicely masking any true problems with the drive like bad sectors etc. It makes the monthly check utterly useless for warning you about true health problems in a drive that may not begin to show those types of errors for 6-7 years. It has been done so that WD can sell a few more drives as when your average punter sees this come up as a warning after 3 years they will probably change drives unnecessarily. 3 Years is nicely just outside the warranty period, coincidentally of course.
 
Bubo said:
Says in the video that their stupid decision to automatically flag drives as in "warning" condition just for being powered on for 3 years means that the monthly health status check that a Synology NAS will give you will always show the drives as in Warning from that point onwards, nicely masking any true problems with the drive like bad sectors etc. It makes the monthly check utterly useless for warning you about true health problems in a drive that may not begin to show those types of errors for 6-7 years. It has been done so that WD can sell a few more drives as when your average punter sees this come up as a warning after 3 years they will probably change drives unnecessarily. 3 Years is nicely just outside the warranty period, coincidentally of course.
Click to expand...
Exactly. So not sure why worrying, surely just "Annoyed at WD, might keep an eye out manually or replace drives"
 
True but couldn't Synology simply filter those warnings or flag them once and have an ignore future matching warnings feature.

Hardware generating warnings is pretty standard but how they're handled should be down to software/users IMO.
 
Last edited:
What, where did i give you the impression i was defending them?

If it's on WD is the fact that Samsung drives report an incorrect NCQ setting on Samsung? Are the perhaps thousands of other hardware with quirks, not following standards, issues and errors on all those hardware manufactures?

It would be great if all hardware was faultless but in the real world that's simply not the case so most software companies patch their software to work around them, it seems Synology have decided they're above doing what Microsoft, Linus Torvald, and and endless list of developers do all the time.
 
I really don't see the problem. I have always believed that after about three years, a drive should be replaced with a new one, or I'm taking an unnecessary risk.
The only drives I don't replace like that are the ones in my NAS because they are less critical.
 
Last edited:
SpellowHouse said:
I really don't see the problem. I have always believed that after about three years, a drive should be replaced with a new one, or I'm taking an unnecessary risk.
The only drives I don't replace like that are the ones in my NAS because they are less critical.
Click to expand...
I try to replace my hard drives when they are around 7-8 years old. By this time they are still normally working, so I use them as monthly backup drives.
 
It's time to sack off HDDs anyway surely, 8TB SSDs have massively dropped in price in recent months :p

Plus Backblaze have reported that their findings in their environment is that the typical HDD lasts 3 years anyway whilst SSDs have overtaken them for reliability.
 
Last edited:
mrk said:
It's time to sack off HDDs anyway surely, 8TB SSDs have massively dropped in price in recent months :p

Plus Backblaze have reported that their findings in their environment is that the typical HDD lasts 3 years anyway whilst SSDs have overtaken them for reliability.
Click to expand...
I still sort of trust hard drives better than SSD drives for my data which isn't frequently accessed - such as documents, videos, music, pictures, etc. At least when a hard drive fails, you'll get some warning signs before it gives up the ghost. This is more than can be said for SSDs which just suddenly conk out on you with little to no warning of the impending doom heading your way.

That said, I keep my drive spinning more or less 24/7 and set Windows to never spin the drive down. The buzzing from my drive annoys me sometimes, as does the cost of keeping the drive powered on.

This comes from a bad experience a while ago now, when I powered the machine off at night and back on in the morning. One morning the drive didn't want to show - I think it just didn't want to spin up. I'd literally given up on the drive, so decided I'd try the freezer trick as a last resort. To my amazement it did work (or I just got lucky) and I was able to access the drive. Not wishing to waste time, I immediately copied everything from that drive and I think it actually kept working until my replacement arrived. :o
 
Aside from the Samsung firmware issues from months gone by which are now resolved, I've yet to see an SSD just randomly fail. Modern SSDs are a night and day improvement over mainstream SSDs of old, though depending on the controller and NAND< many old SSDs are still kicking around today as workhorse drives for many people. I put more trust in an SSD than a HDD and have done for many years.

Plus, regardless of HDD or SSD, all your drives should have a backup anyway as even the best of the best will have a failure rate to each model and some just do leave the factory with a fault from time to time.
 
Last edited:
darael said:
I try to replace my hard drives when they are around 7-8 years old. By this time they are still normally working, so I use them as monthly backup drives.
Click to expand...

In my NAS they are god knows how many years old. I don't think I have ever had one fail. They used to get out of date size wise. I say "used to" because these days my space requirements are not increasing by much.
 
SMR is now old news, they now have specific models for CMR, and my two oldest WD drives are still going strong at 8 years old.

When I did have a WD drive fail a few years back, they then approved the RMA "after" the warranty expired.
 
Last edited:
Meh... he's using a synology device and well they've been pretty shady of late when it comes to hard drives, especially on their 'prosumer' level gear.

Could this be WD, possibly, but I'd expect this more on enterprise hardware than consumer gear due to 'more money' basically... can I see it being synology being shady again, yes, because they seem to be incredibly slow at testing non synology drives for their new hardware and they basically want everyone using their overpriced rebranded toshiba drives instead....

Part of the reason I won't use buy the synology I was planning to buy and am now looking at unraid/truenas as nas options.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom