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Since 2016
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There’s basically duopoly in storage domain. WD and Seagate own most of the market. Although in SSD there are some options like Samsung, Corsair, Sabrent, Crucial etc.
Toshiba has like 20% of the HDD market, but your point remains.
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. 🫣
So far these issues only apply to these specific SSDs … fingers crossed it stays that way, because like you I’ve got a number of WD HDDs in my life.
WD got in trouble not too long ago for deceptively marketing shingled drives as conventional. Back to back issues like this is going to leave a lasting impression on the kinds of people who buy drives.
I agree, I don’t buy WD drives any more. But I don’t want to replace the ones I already have unless it’s necessary.
Except their enterprise drives, of course. Because those customers have the resources to get even.
“so far” is the operative word.
You really don’t want to discover you’re suddenly part of the 2024 list of drives that also are corrupt.
I think the key thing here is that older drives you already own are probably ok. At least if they’re a year old or so.
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?
Samsung, bit more pricey but both my ssd and ram are both Samsung chips and I haven’t had a single problem with either.
E. Seems that further down the thread someone is saying Samsung is having issues too, which is dissapointing as I’ve always trusted Samsung.
Samsung has been hit or miss. For example EVO 840 were a mess a few years ago, had two of them, both slowed to a crawl (Firmware issue, Samsung never managed to fix it).
It’s all a mess :-/
Ye definitely hit or miss, they’ve been excellent for me. I got the 970 EVO last year or the year before and it’s been rock solid, my RAM is also Samsung chips albeit B die so higher bin which probably explains why I’ve never had a single issue with them in 4 odd years.
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.
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!
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.
The complaints are about this specific line, but reflect poorly on the business decisions going into that line, which in turn makes it hard to trust those same managers not to make anti-consumer choices in the future. I’m not going to take my WD/Sandisk drives out of use early, but I’m probably done buying new ones from them.
Excellent. I love my 1TB internal extreme :c
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.
This sounds like maybe early 90’s possibly without voltage regulators at the molex connector. I’ve been doing this a very long time and have never heard of this.
I’ve serviced computers where the ide cable key was hand-striped or with some other marking with a marker as opposed to the line (spoon’s red wire) already keyed from factory, somewhere mid 90’s. regular procedure at that shop i think at that time to mark any unkeyed cable found. not that i ever had to mark any single one, so even then they were really old ide cables.
Actually…i kind or remember a motherboard coming up in smoke from one of those when someone made a mistake. brand new first week technician i think.
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.
From someone who isn’t tech savvy this sounds like star trek jargon
Ehhhh, you aren’t far off. Star Trek jargon was literally made up by the actors and writers, at least according to some of the original cast, with them mimicking the technical jargon that their friends in technical careers, especially electrical engineers, were using at the time.
I am tech savvy and I’ve never heard of SMR or CMR. After reading up on it, I don’t think it really matters. SMR is newer technology, and is maybe more reliable in the short term, but the drives fail faster because of the extra wear and tear, and the drives are slower than CMR.
https://history-computer.com/smr-vs-cmr-hard-drives/
Edit: I missed that SMR is supposed to be worse, despite being newer. So I guess WD is putting slower and sooner failing drives out to save a buck.
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.
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.
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.
Seagate drives should never be used outside of a RAID because the failure rate is so high.
WD is absolutely abusing their power as the only reliable spinning HDD company left, but I have no choice but to continue to buy their increasing overpriced drives because there is no alternative.
How long do they last? I haven’t had any problems so far.
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.
Yeah, SMR is fine for read. And for most homelabs, I’d guess it would be fine. SMR would be a bastard in a high read/write scenario like in an enterprise. But I think all the Red Plus and Red Pros are all CMR now. Only the base Reds have SMR from the sample I took.
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.
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.
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.
Samsung literally just had an SSD drama with their recent drives burning through write cycles and killing the drive.
Yeah Samsung is honestly garbage these days trading on their former reputation for quality. They have horrible, I mean the WORST QA, out of any major brand across the their markets. You have a greater chance of having an issue than not, they do not have any sort of decent RMA process and will just provide patchwork “fixes” consistently until someone’s product runs out of warranty. There is a legendary story of someone trying to get their G5 Flagship Gaming Monitor fixed and sent it in like 13 times and NEVER getting his product fixed or replaced until they hit the warranty deadline. The SSD issue from earlier this year is another great example of complete incompetence.
I would NEVER consider a Samsung product given the alternatives. They all have great specs and you have a 50/50 shot of getting a “good” one but that’s still a ton of risk for a premium priced product.
Crucial is a budget brand. Samsung is the complete opposite (in regards to SSDs).
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
Micron is also an OG memory inventor and still makes some crazy innovations in storage space. Crucial is their performance brand and it’s leagues better than recent Samsung.
Let’s hope Samsung’s general quality issues won’t reach their SSD market.
Huh, my crucial SATA SSD was more expensive than the Samsung equivalent when I bought it a few years ago.
That’s all US lawsuits - any I should know about in the EU?
Wondering as well.
Happened to one of my passports. All wiped won’t connect
You keep using that word Extreme. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Extreme(ly unreliable)
This reminds me that I need to do my bi-annual backup of all my drives.
…onto WD HDDs no less. 😏
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
Here comes the revenge for 1tb of list data and family photos, WD. Get fuuuuuuuuucked!
