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I’m really furious at this. I bought a bunch in the past two years as that’s my go-to brands for my backup solutions. And in the past week, had to buy different brands to diversify.
My main takeaway:
Don’t buy SanDisk. Don’t buy Western Digital.
I don’t care if it’s only a few models. I’m not risking my data.
Every drive in my computer: NVME, SSD, and HDD is a WD drive. 🫣
And frankly, your data should never be in question. Short of a drive failure where the whole drive dies, which would require data recovery services, your data should be safely stored. IMO that’s the premise of data storage; and bluntly, it’s the only job it has… To store, keep, and retrieve data when asked.
If it cannot do that, or has any nontrivial risk of being unable to do that, then it’s not worth the plastics that make up the case. Unless you’re using the drive as a temp/scrub/whatever disk, it’s unusable in my opinion.
I used to only buy WD Reds for my NAS, until they secretly switched them to SMR. I agree that no one should buy from WD anymore.
So what did you end up buying and was that just random choice or based on some research/experience?
Hmmmm
My main NVMe is a 1TB Sandisk Extreme and it’s been doing so well for me for almost five years now.
Perhaps I make more frequent backups.
Me with 2 WD HDDs and 2 Sandisk SD card: this is fine
The complaints are only about a specific line of external ssds. You’re fine.
Excellent. I love my 1TB internal extreme :c
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In May, Ars Technica reported about customer complaints that claimed SanDisk Extreme SSDs were abruptly wiping data and becoming unmountable.
Ian Sloss, one of the lawyers representing Matthew Perrin and Brian Bayerl in a complaint filed yesterday, told Ars he doesn’t believe class-action certification will be a major barrier in a case “where there is a common defect in the firmware that is consistent in all devices.”
Perrin and Bayerl’s complaint mentions the 2TB Extreme, which Western Digital hasn’t officially confirmed as an affected device.
Jafri’s complaint says he bought an Extreme Pro (capacity not specified) because he was on an extended van trip and needed storage for drone footage, photos, and travel mementos.
The cases seek restitution, including damages, and for Western Digital to stop selling the affected drives until they’re fixed or the problems are fully disclosed on all labels, packaging, and advertising.
Sloss told Ars that challenges of the case might include establishing how frequently drives failed after Western Digital shared its May firmware update.
The original article contains 771 words, the summary contains 168 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I’ve thought WD was sleezy ever since they secretly switched from CMR drives to SMR drives, including in their NAS products (for which SMR drives are particularly unsuitable). So this doesn’t surprise me at all.
People need to stop buying WD drives and buy Seagate instead. They had their own SMR scandal, but at least they never put them in their NAS drives.
I used to buy Seagate, but they broke twice or thrice as fast as WD. But that was 8-10 years ago. Are they better now?
I’ve been using ironwolf/exos drives for years without any issues. The 3TB fiasco runs deep and people need to just let it go.
Each manufacturer has their bad batches tbh. I’ve got 12 WD 3TB’s that have been running without a single failure for years, but of the six 4TB WD’s that I bought later five have died already. I’ve been replacing those with 8TB ironwolfs, which have so far been behaving well.
Yeah, my experience with Seagate has sucked.
A few years back i got a failed drive replaced under warranty… died like 6 months shy of its 3 year warranty date. They said they’d replace it and sent me a refurbished drive. It died shortly after it was plugged in, before I’d even started copying files to it. I could literally hear something rolling around in the drive. They replaced it again and the new drive failed similarly… plugged in for a while and then windows started reporting it was not accessible. 3rd drive worked, and still works, but I sure as shit don’t trust it and haven’t bought Seagate since.
The only time I’ve had drives from either company fail was when I knocked my drive cage off the desk while it was running; they’ve all been very reliable otherwise. Seagate drives are usually less expensive, though.
In active service I currently have 5 WD CMR drives, 1 WD SMR drive, 5 Seagate CMR drives, and 2 Seagate SMR drives. I also have 1 WD drive in storage. All WD drives are “Red” (the CMR ones now being called “Red Plus”), the CMR Seagate drives are “IronWolf”, and the SMR Seagate drives are “Barracuda”. My oldest WD drive is from 2018 and my oldest Seagate drive is from 2020.
I owned three Seagates, two of which were used for backups, and had all of them die on me within 1-2 years of light use. I vowed to never buy Seagate again after that.
From what I understand, SMR is fine for NAS as long as you aren’t doing a lot of reads. Like hosting a multimedia server that pulls videos and stuff from the NAS. I recently stood up a TrueNAS server a few months ago with SMR WD disks and it works fine for my use case. It’s RAIDed and backed up to cloud storage. I’m now looking into standing up a media server, but I won’t use that NAS storage for that.
The real downside to SMR drives is “random” writes; adjacent tracks need to be re-written, and then their adjacent tracks, and that keeps going until the tracks adjacent to a write happen to be empty. It doesn’t matter much for long sequential writes (because adjacent tracks will be overwritten anyway). I think the re-writing process also hurts read performance for the host, but reads alone don’t cause rewriting.
If you need to reshape/resilver your array (grow, shrink, or change geometry), it’ll probably take weeks or months with an SMR drive compared to days for a CMR drive.
I got burned by WD’s secret SMR drives in my home NAS and they sucked! They were marketed as NAS drives, but the performance was abominable, the failed sector count grew steadily from day 1 and it felt like they failed 1 early. Once the whole sordid fiasco came to light I switched to Seagate CMR drives and everything has been mostly OK since then.
Back in the day, working with WD was a nightmare. The spinning HDs never came with a keyed IDE cable. It must have saved them $.0001 per HD shipped. If you accidentally put the cable in backwards, it not only burned out the logic board on the WD HD, it would also burn out any other drives on the cable. And the IDE controller on the motherboard. Now it is easy to remember how to do it right. Install the power cable and then make sure the red wire on the power cable was next to the red wire (pin 1) on the IDE cable. But if you rush or make an assumption, that was an expensive mistake.
Wow. That’s such a ridiculous oversight.
Just a reminder of the 3-2-1 backup model.
Semi important things are backed up to my home server. Super important stuff is also stored on a big name cloud service.
Also, don’t forget paper exists. For smaller documents, it could be worth printing them, and putting them in a water/fire resistant safe.
Also, don’t forget paper exists. For smaller documents, it could be worth printing them, and putting them in a water/fire resistant safe.
Before paper, and somewhere in-between the digital and analogue, maybe go weird with discs or magnetic tape drives (if you’re really into your electromagnetic data storage)?
And for the sillier side to this: don’t forget to laser etch the most important records in stone. Don’t think it’s worth the trouble? Wouldn’t have some of our ancient records if they weren’t literally carved in stone, so…Incidentally, would anyone happen to know of any personal robotic stone engraving tools one could get?
Would be fun to pass in some text and let a machine go to work on some stray stones.
Serious question:
How do you guys handle backups and how often do you do it?
I know I’m not doing particularly well. Once in a blue moon I’ll copy over files from my main drive onto my secondary drive. But I’m not doing anything fancy - literally copy the Documents and a few other folders and that’s it. I’m not compressing anything. I’m still keeping that secondary drive connected to my PC so if I got a virus, all that data could be infected. I also store some files on my Gdrive and OneDrive but those have long since filled up and I rarely bother to go through them to delete what I didn’t need anymore.
I feel whatever backup tools Windows has built in are probably worthless, but then again, I could be totally wrong on that.
Curious how real people handle this.
I’m using vorta with borgbackup. It’s a set and forget solution with very reasonable pricing. Saved my ass a few times already.
I sync specific locations on my PC and laptop with my Nextcloud server. This means I’ll have 3 copies. The Nextcloud server also keeps snapshots in case the wrong data is synced to all devices.
My important stuff gets backed up to a personal S3 bucket. Stuff I use regularly goes to my Google Drive as well. I’ve got my personal server that’s has 80TB of raid space, but that’s data that I can afford to lose.
I’m using Genius Scan+ on my phone and bought the cloud backup option for like $3 one-off, that enables automated exports to dropbox, google drive and a bunch of other services. Every document I receive is scanned and adequately named right away, and then automatically exported to both google drive and dropbox.
The dropbox client then again runs on my laptop and desktop and automatically syncs new files to the local folders, so I have the original scan on my phone plus two cloud backups and the local copies of the cloud backups on another two devices.
The original documents are kept in physical folders, neatly stored at home.
In case the important document is a digital copy only, I will export it from my mailbox directly to the dropbox & google drive, so it’s the same as above minus the copy on my phone. Depending on how important it is, I might also print a copy for safekeeping and/or forward it to a secondary email should I ever lose access to my primary.
I bought a Synology NAS with 4 bays and set up Raid 6. This provides 2 drive failure protection. All files on my computer are automatically sync’d to the NAS via Synology’s self hosted cloud drive service. This provides the additional benefit of version history of files. The NAS is backed up to a single large drive on a regular basis. That drive is stored off site.
All my important stuff is stored on my NAS that runs truenas. Several times a day data is replicated to another truenas box in the same rack and at night data is rclone’d to Wasabi object storage.
For stuff on my PC like my Firefox and thunderbird profiles I use macrium backup whose backups get stored on my NAS.
Happened to one of my passports. All wiped won’t connect
I’m so glad I use crucial SSDs
Are crucial SSDs good? I’ve been pondering getting a new SSD lately, but with this news I’m starting to lose hope on WD.
Crucial and Samsung have good reputations.
Crucial is a budget brand. Samsung is the complete opposite (in regards to SSDs).
Let’s hope Samsung’s general quality issues won’t reach their SSD market.
Crucial is a budget brand
Where did you hear this?
The MX500 is pretty much the market leader as far as older SATA SSDs are concerned, with PLP capacitors, very generous NAND overprovisioning, and an onboard DRAM cache if I’m not mistaken.
The BX series is pretty budget oriented though, those are just standard 3D nand SSDs with no PLP, no DRAM.
If storage TBs are the concern, Samsung absolutely offers higher capacities than the MX series last time I checked
Edit: forgot the most important piece of info… Crucial is essentially Micron, the RAM and SSD manufacturer. They only sell things that Micron manufactures, so they don’t sell SD cards, blank CDs and other generic storage stuff
Huh, my crucial SATA SSD was more expensive than the Samsung equivalent when I bought it a few years ago.
I haven’t bought a WD drive over reliability concerns for quite a few years now, but now it makes sense too. I’ve seen way too many reports of Sandisk drives failing, with the news swept under the rug, and that’s very on brand for WD to do
I’ve got an older 500GB one that has been going strong for years. But yeah I just bought a Crucial
Hynix Gold/Platinum are good, in case anyone is looking for replacements for their NVMe SSDs.
Wow, I really like WD SSDs, I got an SN850X and it’s blazing fast. I really like that you can change the sector size as well, most SSDs don’t bother with 4k sectors and just leave you with 512b ones.
Well, that’s not a model that’s listed so your should be good. It’s only a few models with issues.
