I found PROOF!
Вставка
- Опубліковано 4 жов 2024
- I have found proof about what happened between Synology and Western Digital Red Drives! This is about the ongoing issues between Western Digital Device Analytics (WDDA) flagging drives as requiring replacement when they are only 3 years of power on hours.
[watch before] Last video on Western Digital Drive Test: • Stop Buying WD NAS Dri...
Further info on the forums (including key links and documents): forums.spacere...
Disclaimer *
No one has paid me to make this video or has any control over it. However I have received free hard drives in the past from both Synology (3x 8TB HDDs) and Segate (4x 8TB HDDs), though the Segate drives were through a third party. These drives were for review units, but I did get to keep them. This did not influence the making of this video, but I have included this for full transparency.
Drives that I use (affiliate)*
Amazon: amzn.to/435hcIK
BH Photo: bhpho.to/3MmbnRG
@nascompares video mentioned: • WD Red NAS Warning Iss...
My video with @nascompares on this: • WD Red WDDA IS A FAKE ...
How to disable WDDA: • WD Red, Synology and W...
NAS compares write up: nascompares.co...
QNAP WDDA Test: • WD Red NAS WDDA Warnin...
How to understand when a drive is dying (Backblaze SMART data) www.backblaze....
#NAS #wdda
Hire Me! yarboroughtech...
Support the Channel & Get Early Access to ALL Videos: / spacerexwill
*These are Amazon affiliate links, which means that if you purchase a product through one of them, I will receive a small commission (at no additional cost to you). Thank you for supporting my channel!
Good summary of the problem, but as a software engineer (not for WD) I can tell you that you've found two translation files. These translation files are mapped to specific constant values that are returned by WDDA, but source code of the WDDA will be secret, possibly developped internally by WD. Meaning, you can delete the translation, but it will most likely just display something as "ACTION.DESCRIPTION.0x0..." something something. Well, depending on the software quality. It might also just crash because of missing translation.
yep, I work in software too, and that was exactly my thought - those are just the localization resources.
...yes? it's the localization but the end user monitoring softwares (synology, qnap) he's referring to is what handles the error codes coming from and decided by WD.
he's suggesting they just ignore/don't handle the specific error from WD's software because that specific error is misleading and unnecessary; not to simply delete the localization lines.
WD has been pulling sneaky sh** for quite a while now. They will continue to push things until it affects their sales. Let's hope this will do that.
Yeah. As for me I've been afraid to buy anything else that WD. And now I'm even afraid to buy WD.
Luckily I don't need any new drivers for a while...
WD Pro warranties are 5 years so wouldn't a prefail warning at 3 years suggesting a replacement from WD's own test justify a warranty drive replacement from WD?
@@GarettHarnishIt’s not clear if this also effects Red Pro but if it does a lot of people that bought WD drives from Amazon will find out their warranties are not covered through WD. I see comments about that every time I look at drives on Amazon. I only buy them directly from WD or in person, in the retail packaging, from MicroCenter. What a mess. I hope it doesn’t effect WD Pros in any way. I was going to go Toshiba for three drives this week because of the Synology compatibility list, for the Toshibas having higher storage capacity, so I hope they are good.
WD has so little confidence in their products that they think... if you've actually gotten it to work for three years, you had better replace it soon!
For the Reds, yeah... everyone has known the Reds were trash since inception. Why do you think they did SMR on the Reds first? To see if the trash drive buyers would accept it first. The Blacks and Golds are great. Stay away from Reds, Purples, Greens and Blues. This is a warning for those that made the mistake of buying WD reds, not a bid for more money. I think the difference between "might consider" and the NAS maker saying "please consider" is huge as well (the later is an imperative, so it is much stronger language). It's like the difference between your mechanic shrugging and saying, "meh, you can replace it if you feel like it to make the light turn off" vs. looking at you pleadingly saying, "please consider replacing it for the safety of yourself and others on the road."
I appreciate the effort to get to the bottom of this. I gave up on WD long ago after having several external drives crash hard enough to lose all of my data.
In case you didn't know, 100% of hard drives will eventually fail. It's unavoidable.
In my experience Seagate gave been even less reliable
I guess we all have a sample of one but I’ve never lost data on a volume because of a WD red or Red Pro crashing and I’ve probably had 15 or so over the years.
I've had the exact opposite issue. I've had many more SG drives fail versus WD
Great efforts. I’m an avid fan for a long time.
Keep up the good work man and keep exposing them.
I only use WD on all my servers, but this horrible practice will make me think twice next time I’m in the market for more storage.
Shame on you WD.
Thanks man!
This was by far the most research I have put into a video!
I am in luck. I always have been a WD Red guy. When I started with my FreeNAS box those were the most recommended on the FreeNAS forum. But just when I was about to replace the WD Red drives in my then FreeNAS now TrueNAS server, the scandal with the WD Red SMR drives was going on. My TrueNAS server is now running Iron Wolf drives. Just as the two Synology boxes I have for use in the home. But deep down inside I fear that sooner or later Seagate will have a nasty surprise for us as well. Profit is the bottom line for those companies.
@@Evertb1 I have both WD red pro and Ironwolf pro and for my very small sample size the ironwolfs are getting reallocated sectors long before any WD red have had any, so bad that the ironwolf was replaced only a few years and the WD Red have been running for 4 times as long and none of them had any problems. So like you said they both have their problems :)
@@MagnusOlssonMalvik The problem with the WD Reds was that WD without any warning started to use SMR drives in the Red series. Rendering them almost useless under certain circumstances. I have used WD drives (not only Reds) for a lot of years without much problems but some things just can't be tolerated. I could not accept the sneaky way WD was doing this. Though to date I have no quality problems at all with my IronWolfs and no reported errors yet. But I am sure it can happen that one or more of them develop problems. Hopefully not before the planned 5 years use.
Impressive work Will... antidotal story here; I spoke with an exec from WD regarding a removable drive failure. I was upset that it was going to cost me 2k for recovery of my data. He explained that they have
Nice deep dive, thanks. You truly are a Rex of NAS. This is really the critical type of reporting that we need.
Thanks man!
@@SpaceRexWill Good job bro
Agree
It's interesting that some WD Red Pro drives have this enabled even though those have 5 year warranties.
This makes it seem like a pro for WD. Maybe they'll just give you a new drive since you bought the premium reds?
BIG Scandal lurking in the 'fine print' of WDDA: (from the WD Support page)
" ... What data do we collect?
Usage data may include items such as device configuration, CPU and other usage statistics by application, API calls, service crash information, network status, storage utilization, search terms and size and type of files ... "
- API calls = Every App you run gets reported back
- search Terms = REALLY? WHY?
- size & type of file = FINGERPRINTING is possible
I've always stuck with WD drives for YEARS but because of this issue, (and the SMR issue) I went with Seagate IronWolf drives for my new Synology NAS so I'm glad to see what you've found here. Great video and thanks for the info!!
I use Toshiba. I believe these are what Synology rebrands as there own. Have been moving from Seagate and WD to these and am very happy
I have 4 WD drives, one just crapped out 2 months ago and has been running for at least 3 years. Time for a change going forward
Speculation;
If this list is applied selectively based on drive models, then I would presume that the list represents those drive models that Western Digital knows are more likely to fail prematurely, and they want users to pull the drives before they actually fail to;
1) avoid warranty repairs, and/or
2) reduce future PR / reputation issues regarding large numbers of failures being documented.
- this is informative and unfortunate.
I hate that WD keeps shooting themselves in the foot. Their drives used to be great, and in my experience (both at the datacenter and at home), much more reliable than the competition.
I recently had 4 drives on my NAS “fail” within a few weeks of each other recently, which were all WD Reds. I had the sneaking suspicion that WD was doing something shady like this as it didn’t make sense that they would fail like that. I replaced with Seagate drives where I could just because I knew it was BS and likely related to their bios.
Was trying to find information about it previously which is why I think I got this recommendation.
Thanks for going deep and getting to the bottom of this!
DIi they actually fail, as in drop off -line/stop working, or just give the stupid warnings over excessive power on hours/3 years usage?
They know how to make drives last ! they are dogging us
Great work. It's a pity that most users of NAS devices will never see this. This should be widely known. Not only to shake up the people at WD but also as a warning to other brands that consumers are not stupid.
I think people that at least remotely follow this space were shaken up a bit by that SMR/CMR issue few years back (personaly got burned on 6TB "NAS" drive).. so I'll most likely avoid WD for foreseeable future or until seagate have some big issue that makes me reconsider my stance
edit - accidentality wrote synology instead of seagate
@@astacc so whats the recommended drive for synology? Need help
I suspect this issue will become known… Expect this to blow up in, say, LTT (they use A LOT of hard drives, and Linus Sebastian is known for also going nuclear on anti-consumer practices, e-waste, etc.) and become really ugly for WD…
@@rnyzen2.079 Up to date I have seen no negative comments for Seagate Iron Wolf drives. I run 14 of them myself (8 x 4 TB in TrueNAS server, 4 x 4 TB in DS918+ and 2 x 8 TB in Synology DS220+)
I have about 60 WD red disks and have had no issues in TrueNAS.... some of the older disks are much much older than three years and have been transplanted from several server iterations. All are conventional media and non shingled drives. I have complete trust in my ZFS pools with several layers of backup.
Whether or not a test tells me so, my own personal rule that has served me well over 30 years is that once a drive is out of warranty, I pull it from being a drive I count on. I buy 5 year enterprise drives only (Golds, and HGST HCxxx, Exos) for home usage. I also pull drives upon the very first smart error. I manage a couple hundred TB at home, and this has never let me down. While you're right about the life of the drive being underestimated, I'd rather be safe than sorry. Even with redundancy in place, I just don't want the headache, and pull it on my terms.
Well you have a lot of money and probably represent 1% of the people out there. So you are that 1% elite. Congrats. Do you change the tires on your car every year too? Thankfully you aren't an influencer. You can't be an influencer when you have views that are shared by 1% of the population.
The decision is even simpler for me: I won't trust a manufacturer that sells 5-year warranties and throws drive warning errors at just 3 years of usage, 100% of the time on 100% of drives. WD ideally should re-brand these drives at 3-years, if their internal telemetry shows so many errors at years 4 & 5.
I've been watching your videos for a while. Now you gained a new subscriber.
Awesome, thank you!
Thanks for the info. On my DS1821+, DS1621+, and DS1520+ (all DSM 7.2-64561) WDDA was enabled in the synoinfo.conf file (support_wdda="yes"). However, none of my WD drives had the WDDA option showing in Storage Manager - HDD/SSD - Health Info (multiple 8TB WD80EFZZ-68BTXN0 and 14TB WD140EFGX-68B0GN0). As a precaution I have set support_wdda="no" (via SSH instruction) on all three of my NAS units.
Edit: After update to DSM7.2 64570 WDDA resets to "yes" / Update to DSM 7.2 64570 update 1 either retains the "no" setting or defaults to "no" (already had WDDA set to "no" when I updated to 64570 update 1)
WD should take the lead to prove this is wrong, not Synology. WD has a business interest to be one of the HDD suppliers for Synology not the way around. Very poor management of the WD company. Good work Spacerex! You are not to blaim what so ever. Keep on the good work. Bery much appriciated also in The Netherlands 💪
I love many of the European countries, like yours, that have a much better, unbiased and measured view, than seems to be prevalent in the U.S. !
I have a BUNCH of 4 TB WD Re drives (WD4000FYYZ) and I did a quick spot check. I have at least one drive with 71183 Power_On_Hours (97 months or 8.1 years) and several others with 5+ years (61443 hrs [7 yrs], 51289 hrs [5.8 yrs], 46148 hrs [5.2 yrs], 42550 hrs [4.8 yrs]). And the majority of the drives that fail on me fail with ~1 year of spinning time. Quite agree: age doesn't predict failure (except where a younger drive is more likely fail).
Fixed in 7.2-64570 Update 2. "Adjusted the suggestions generated by Western Digital Device Analytics (WDDA)."
Awesome! Just saw that!
Just go ahead and hit the subscribe button!
If anyone stumbles upon this comment and isnt already go ahead and just do it now, you thank yourselves later.
Absolutely appreciate all the hard work and helpful info 👍
Glad you liked it!
While I'll agree that the root problem is WD saying this is an error for the drive, Synology should be able to program the DSM to not react to it as an error, but only as an informational parameter, which is how WD should have treated this parameter. "User may consider..." is NOT a message that should trigger an error. The wording of this sounds informational only. Synology should not be doing anything with this other than passing on the information to the user. The wording does NOT indicate an error state with the drive. The wording should simply be changed to indicate the number of hours the drive has been in use, with no further comment.
They don't say it is an error, it is a warning that the drive is approaching the end of its spec lifetime. It is for information purposes to aid you in the management of your drive portfolio.
@@Tugela60 Agreed. But it appeared that Synology was overreacting to that informational message and treating it as an error. Also, if the software to read that message is turned on, it's probably going to become a nag message. Nag messages induce the "cry wolf" syndrome and people start ignoring significant messages. I have hard drives that are 20 years old and doing fine, a nag at 3 years is ridiculous.
I think the concept of power on hours exceeding warranty etc is absolutely reasonable but to your point, it can/should be worded differently.
Fantastic video! As others have said, thanks for all the work that has gone into uncovering this.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Thank you from Japan.
So glad I'm follow you. Thanks for doing all the research.
Speaking of using 2x4tb wd red (cmr) for about 42500 hours in wd ex2 nas, both are still functioning as of 2023.09.23, but 1 started to show sign of weakness so I put it in pc for casual use. Two weeks ago, I put in a new toshiba n300 8tb with the other wd red 4tb and set as JBOD, working OK with n300 at 36C and 2 degrees cooler and more silent than red. Bottom line: WD red is an ordinary hdd and WD as an international company should act more reputably and reliably to its customers.
WD makes incredible drives but why anyone would use a Red/Red Pro in a Synology is beyond me. You should only EVER use the UltraStar. These are cheaper, stronger, faster, and actually designed for NAS and farms and network servers. I stopped using Seagate and Toshiba years ago in favor of UltraStars, you all should too. Sure would be nice if Synology would just make a 100% NVMe NAS, that would fix this.
This WDDA test setting and alarm state is more applicable to Enterprise environments and Managed Support Services contractors where they will have a budget for planned replacement of drives to minimise downtime. It is probably overkill for SMBs, SoHo and in-house maintenance Use Cases.
To be fair, there is a WIDE gulf between "might consider replacing" and "should replace". IMO, the "might consider" should be handled as INFO, not WARN. That is on Synology's handling of the signal. Information is there to allow the user to apply his risk level. If my fuel gauge indicates half full, I will consider filling up. If my wife's fuel tank indicates half full, I should fill it up. Not that I'm a fan of WD for their other transgressions and their lack of transparency, but I think this particular issue is way overblown against WD.
Exactly. I wonder if QNAP will also consider this flag as a warning.
This.
Thanks for this. I am about to purchase an additional Synology bay and was about to put in WD drives. Based on this, I'll switch to Seagate.
What I can't understand is Western Digital's motivation for doing this. Yes, the obvious answer is to sell more HDDs. I get that. Where my confusion lies is with the idea that, as a company that manufactures HDDs, why in the world would you openly brand your own as being unreliable beyond a 3 year life span?
Whether nefarious or just plain dumb, Western Digital is indirectly labelling their own HDDs as inadequate and substandard. Even if they weren't being called out on it, it seems to me that it would still be in their best interest to squash this asap.
Thanks for researching this, Will. Your conclusions are compelling and much appreciated.
Good point. I would hesitate to buy a drive that warned me to replace it as soon as the warranty was over. I bet the WD engineers are like WTF, our drives don't all fail at 3 years!
Thanks for investigating deeper on the topic !
What about the WD Ultrastar drives??? I really appreciate the all time hero HGST line.
This isn't as big a deal as the outrage crowd makes it out to be. These are simply helpful messages to people who otherwise pay no attention to smart results. I'm still a WD man, especially since I tried a bunch of Ironwolfs and they run too hot. I have 22 8tb+ drives spinning across 3 servers and I have never in the 6 years of running servers had to replace a WD Red. But I have replaced 3 Ironwolfs in the past year. This warning message is nothing I can't ignore. Save your outrage for Synology's self-branded drive enforcement.
Interesting, after seeing this, I went in to my system and there is no longer a WDDA tab under the drive "Health Info" section. It now just says Overview, SMART, and History. None of my 4 18TB WDC WD181KFGX drives in my DS920+ running DSM 7.2-64570.
It says they recommend replacing the drives.
No problem. I'll replace them with another company's drives.
recently updated a QNAP NAS and started receiving a warning that the WD SSDs have over 20,000 hours and should be replaced soon. SMART estimates they still have 97% life left.
I wonder if the NAS has WD drives, and is doing exactly what this video is about. This would lend more support to the idea that this is a problem of WD drives rather than Synology.
@@qcnck2776 Yes, it's a 4 bay NAS and it only gives me the warning on the 2 WD SSDs I have installed.
More people need to see this. Commenting to try to boost this in the algorithm. Share this with your friends and family!
I have a 12 year old Segate drive running in my DS412+ with 107,933 on time hours and running strong. It's interisting to know that after 100,000 hours of on time hours the counter rolls over to 0 hours.
Could you explain how "running" this test is actually creating a problem that can cause early drive failure as opposed to simply reporting a problem that can ignored?
Ok, so the warranty is a 5 year warranty. Clearly they believe that the drives cannot last 5 years so they are throwing out a code saying g the drive is failing after only 3. So they are saying you get a new drive after 3 years, right?
I found some software somewhere I forget right now what it was called. It was designed for data recovery/ drive repair. The demo version has the ability to clear SMART data which includes power on hours count. I wonder if this would reset the WDDA warning. The software was specifically for certain WDD drives
Where is the control to disable it?
Thank you for sharing your expertise.
So essentially if I don't use that weird tool because I do it my own way, there is no problem with WD Red NAS drives? The whole point of this video is premature warning based on power-on hours or powercycles?
I don't own a Synology, but do own an Asustor. I hope they learn from this and don't add this awful software from WD, since I have 4 Reds in it!
Thanks for the PSA!
Great! Thanks for the research and result sharing.
As a rule, I phase out hard drives and SSDs every 3-5 years. Even if it is perfectly functional, I will either get rid of it or relegate it to service as a low priority games drive, so I couldn't care less if it fails.
Saying that, having a diagnostic software become functionally useless on a device after 3 years is moronic.
Those files are just translatiom files to make readable text for error codes in all languages though, not a directive from Western Digital that anyone would have read.
I guess after 30 years in IT I see it differently. WD has been in business a very long time and their drives are good quality. If they are triggering a informational warning after 3 years of use time, they must know something. It would trigger me to order a replacement drive and have it ready in my work environment and have a drive in my Amazon shopping list for my home NAS. That is assuming I'm using Mirroring or RAID 5 and up. Otherwise, I'd replace the drive immediately to play it safe.
The problem is that this flag causes the NAS to consider drives unsuitable for the RAID. If a corruption is found in one of the drives, NAS will not allow you to attempt a repair. The bottom line is that drives do not have any real issue. It should be just a recommendation and not cause impact on your NAS operation. Also, a permanent WARNING status on all drives could mask other "real" issues as you may become used to see the RAID status that way. All these points were made by SpaceRex in the previous video.
@@idlewildbr That is an issue with the NAS OS, not WD. If the OS can't tell the difference between an error and a warning then maybe you need to use a different OS.
That file is just a template they send to every manufacturer so that they can translate the messages to multiple languages. Every manufacturer can customize the messages to their taste, I don't think you have a case here.
Where you have a case is on calling them out on trying to control when users replace their drives.
I'm still using a 16 year old, non NAS, WD hard drive (currently 79322 power on hours, so realistically 9 years of actual use), and replacing a NAS drive after three years sounds a bit comical to me.
Another important thing is, be carefull when you say that all you need is to delete the power on test. If you delete the line that mentions it you're just deleting the localized message. I'm willing to bet that the drive still gets marked with the warning, it just doesn't show (because there's no message to show).
You can always do this test, try deleting the message and get the details of an already marked drive, I'm guessing that the message that previously said to replace the drive won't show up.
What do you recommend instead of WD Red Pro?
Seagate Ironwolf Pro?
Something else?
Nice work Sherlock! Thank goodness I have Seagate drives.
Seems like it's still Synology who chose arbitrarily the 3 years threshold.
for me been using the Toshiba N300 (4tb x4) for the last 6 years on my synology ds418, and i've been happy. yes they are a little loud but thats all i've every use so i really cant compare them to any other.
is it just predatory tactics or are they marketing cheaper drives as "nas-rated" so they will start failing after 3+ years of use?
As always great video. That happend to me a while ago, I would say shame on WD, and I will not buy WD anymore.
This is such a shame... I've been interested to build a nas for a while now and I first looked into getting a Synology nas with WD drives since both those brands seemed to be popular and sounded good at first. Then I heard about the way Synology is trying to force users into only getting their drives which was a big no no from me, then this shady stuff with WD trying to trick users into buying new drives while their "old" drives are perfectly fine. So I think I'll drop both of them and instead look into getting a Qnap nas with Seagate drives instead. I haven't completely made up my mind yet but what I'm thinking of is the following:
- Qnap TS-873A-8G 8-Bay Tower
- 8 Seagate IronWolf Pro 16TB 7200rpm 256MB
For home use I have a Synology DS918+ (main) and a DS 220+ (back-up). Both equipped with Iron Wolf hard drives (4 TB and 8 TB). I did not see any problem at all. Working without issues for almost 3 years now. There has been several tests on Google with non Synology disks on the newer Synology models (NasCompares for example) and as far as I know, no issues have been found. Though I admit that Synology put the pressure on the consumers to go for their own branded disks. Hardware wise you have a good brand with QNap (superior to Synology) but when it comes to the OS, Synology is superior. In my opinion that are more important factors then the brand of your disks.
This showed up in my recommendations at the perfect time.
1. I've been slowly working towards getting a home media server. Didn't buy drives yet but now I know to avoid WD.
2. I read that Backblaze article about failing drives, checked the smart status of the mass storage hard drive in my PC, and it's throwing some huge numbers in 3 of the 5 categories highlighted. Just bought a new drive to transfer the files onto before anything happens.
Thanks, you saved me twice!
DSM gives a scary warning when it's merely a notification. Congrats again Synology...
I don't get the blame for synology. You just watched a video showing this alert is word for word from WD and is made by WD program and passed to synology, and if you replace the drive with another WD, WD profits.
I think if you look at the info from WD, it is clear that the warning is coming from WD.
And it appears that Synology has turned off the WDDA app in all their 2023 forwards NASs.
Useful notification from WD, specially if you buy second hand, and DSM make it look like there is problem when there is actually not.
Solution from Synology: turning off WDDA? lol
How is it useful to say that "warning, you now have x number of hours on your drive, buy another one?" Does WD have such a low opinion of their drives that they will expire after X number of hours? And are they guaranteeing that there will be no failure before x number of hours? Please note I said guarantee, not warranty.
Do you replace your CPU after its warranty runs out?
It seems WD can't stop stepping on a rake.
I'm replacing some ancient drives (WD Red HDD data and parity drives, SK Hynix SSD cache pool) that have failed or are failing in my Unraid server. I'm also adding a second SSD to my ThinkPad. Even though this issue doesn't affect me, (and I didn't get any of the SMR Reds) I'm taking WD off my personal vendor list. You can't rely on a product if you can't rely on the company that makes it.
Great research and action taken! Thanks for going to bat on this!
Interesting video!
My first take is... What's your data worth. Seriously. If your data store goes down, what does it cost, potentially losing your work between backups? What does it cost while the data store is rebuilding? I remember Splunk servers getting absolutely hammered while rebuilding a drive. For days! Having a mirrored data store may be a requirement.
I also think "NAS" class drives don't replace "Enterprise" class drives. Again, in a business situation, what's your data worth? Not to mention the increased speed of SAS drives.
I will also say that if I have a drive in an array that starts having problems, I'm going to replace all of the drives immediately. My best example was having 4 drives from the same box (desktop drives) fail in the same week (from 5 total) in my lab server. This was 30 years ago and not WD. My point being when one drive fails, the rest are right behind. I've never been too happy with a "hot spare"... In my lab, doesn't really matter much. In production, it keeps me from having to explain to the "C" suite folks. And your customers!
Also something to think about is old data center servers. They typically take them out of service after 5 years and have the Enterprise class hardware already in them. Put something like FreeNAS or roll your own and you have a pretty solid system. Do use new drives!!!
I'll also mention that I have a red and purple drive, both 9 years old, running in TIVO boxes that are still running perfectly! That's running 24/7 recording 6 channels of HD constantly for 9 years!
So yes, WD is being kind of sleazy about this!
Thanks for the video!
By that thinking why don't you just replace your hard drives every year? Or maybe every 6 months. The entire point of RAID and smart tests is to only have to replace the drives that are failing or look to be failing. I'm about to drop $6,000 in hard drives. Do you think I'm going to replace those in 3 years? If so you're insane. The simple fact of the matter is Western Digital's spinning drives are are slowly tanking. Upper management's freaking out, some freaking sales critter had a bright idea and probably force fed it down the development seems throat.
So I just watched the first video a couple of hours ago and as someone who burned through a lot of HDDs over the last couple of years, I just doublechecked on all I still had flying around and also some invoices and most of them that broke down were WD Red and one WD Green. The Blacks were fine but I guess they don't sell them anymore?
I use a lot of HDDs to store data for video cutting/editing for myself and also as a freelance cutter (I started recently to offer my services) and even on a non 24/7 usage, most of my WD HDDs died after about 3 years, while I still have other HDDs that are older, but still fine...
This is almost as bad as tagging a drive as "warning" if you plug it in after sitting in a plastic bag for 5 years.
Synology is going to continue to pass it thru for legal liability reasons. Which is also why WD created it also. They remove WD’s warning then WD can dump disk failure on Synology. “We told you…”
Well, the description from WD looks legit to my eye, it doesn't say "shut down the drive", it looks like it is Synology who making that decision. The warning is a warning, but it should not brick those drives.
It does not brick the drives
WD: Take this shotgun and shoot my knee, Synology: As You wish :D
Thanks for this, I am just about to replace my Synology and drives. I won't be buying WD drives
Hey your car warranty is running out please consider buying a new one. 👀
I'm looking at just getting my Data on LTO-9 in the future. Its pretty sad that just making a data tape costs you almost as much just renting a drive and buying a few tapes to do it yourself..
Heh, interesting stuff...
I've got 6 old WD Green drives (WD10EADS) still doing fine in a 12 bay NAS. They have passed 93k hours. Also got 6 WD Red 3TB drives with over 73k hours.
My DS2413+ failed long before the drives. Never turned back on after a reboot to upgrade DSM.
Tried with a single empty drive and it basically never booted back up. I had been running 24/7 for many years before that.
Got a DS2419+ and just moved the drives over.
how much warranty are they giving? some sellers could give extended warranty beyond 3 years, are they f----d?
I have WD Red Pro 16tb drives and a Synology Nas, I don't even see WDDA test in storage manager as an option, so it's definitely not enabled on mine by default, running DSM 7.2
All those ASCII files and the web page text don't have anything to do with the behavior of the NAS, i.e. if it should flag the drive or not. All they do is offer human readable explanations to the codes, and _nothing_ else.
Thank you for your effort figuring this out.
at least its not like apple pushing a new device every 6 months
i'm guessing that they don't offer a replacement if this happens during the warranty period
Thank you for your research. I noticed you mentioned Seagate drives in your other video. Instead of WD do you recommend Seagate? Thanks.
It's just a lookup table for converting from an arcane status code returned by the test software to plain English (or any other language, as appropriate).
So, you're basically saying to not 'accept' or 'agree to' the Data Analytics feature when setting up these drives? Is that correct?
Some of these hard drives will whine and grind and sound terrible and they must have been running for 20 years. One time I was sent a drive that was notorious for blowing power supplies - it was for a hp RIP and it blew out 2 computer power supplies and it would have blown the power supply in my RIP for sure. Parts are designed sometimes to blow out other parts.
Luckily my Western Digital Red Plus drives don't come with the analytics function. It would be insane if I would have to renew my drives every three years. I would throw my Nas out of the window, because then I can go and use a cloud service.
No one, using a proper OS, has to renew WD drives, even those that issue the "power on time" information, every three years. No one. If you want to blame anyone for making the "power on time" matter an issue, blame Synology for treating this information like actually relevant warnings.
How do we disable it and please don't come at me with a ton of acronyms. My 4TB NAS is coming up to 2½ years old so now I'm worried.
great video! So do you recommend if this anomaly occurs, to take the Seagate?
As long as they are not stopping your from using the drives then I don't see an issue. From what I have read the average HDD will last 3 to 5 years. A little warning before they die isn't such a bad idea really. I mean at least your getting something for the extra money your paying for the red sticker vs a regular blue sticker. I mean mechanical drives have been around long enough that other than capacity, nothing really changes on them. Personally I would think that a warning before your data is potentially gone forever would be a good feature. Unless I completely missed the point and you just can't use the drives any longer then that would be a serious issue. I personally would NEVER buy a proprietary NAS or Server because you give up all control of the OS that you are given. I'm so glad I bought an HPE Microserver and I am in full control of the software. Western Digital's marketing is about as lame as Windows 7 back in the day and people fall for it. Everyone gets a green box unless you pay more then we'll give you a blue box or pay even more and we'll give you a black box. It was all the same software. WD everybody gets a blue sticker unless you pay more and then well give you a red sticker or a purple sticker, pay more and well give you a black one. Not sure what magic fairy dust is in a WD Red drive but I don't really care I bought the vanilla blue stickered ones because they are all the same anyways.
Except there are lots of drive that last 5+ years. If you wanted to use it longer then it effectively is hiding the other information that you could use to figure out that there is going to be an immanent failure.
It isn't just the colour of the label or the box. Windows Professional comes differently configured from Windows Home, with more business orientated features enabled - that's why you pay more for it. Windows Enterprise is configured differently again so that an IT department can deploy hundreds of identical PCs and manage them centrally, installing updates when appropriate and ensuring that every Monday morning the users can get on with their work and are not faced with "Windows is updating - please wait." Hard drives for different applications run different firmware and there are mechanical differences between them. While it's quite possible Greens were indeed just Blues with different firmware that's optimised for saving power, Blues, Black and Golds are all made on different production lines from different parts.
@@johnm2012 So you're saying that you worked for Western digital or Seagate and know this information first hand? And you're not just regurgitating information that you heard on UA-cam somewhere or social media or are just assuming?
@@markjones2349 Your assumption that one must either work for a manufacturer or rely on social media for information is rather short sighted.
Anything that is unnecessarily annoying... I tend to stop using/supporting it... and WD just got added to that list... Synology NAS'es is getting close to getting added too for their recent greedy practices. 😡
My man, you need to turn your exposure down on your camera you're filming this with. Appreciate the content.
I've never used synology or the other ones, but I don't think editing the file and deleting error code #2 will necessarily help in the long run.
Do these NAS solutions (synology & co) not do upgrades on their software? One such upgrade could easily restore the check/error.
Great research, How long do do think mechanical HDD manufacturers have left before SSD price and capacity takes over in the prosumer space ?
Still a lot, since higher than 12TB, SSDs are multiple orders of magnitude more expensive than HDDs.
@@LtdJorge yeah enterprise the price is okay but not great for us consumers
Hopefully we do get 16+ TB drives even if it's not the absolute fastest chips. It would still be better than spinning discs
thx for the insights. from my experience, ironwolf health management doesn't show any errors even if S.M.A.R.T. shows bad sectors. not any better than WDDA imo
So I just bought two WD Red Plus 8TB disks. Are these a bad purchase, or should I just ignore whatever WDDA says? As a second question, what _should_ I be keeping an eye on for drive health?
This shot could backfire for WD. I have an ancient HP microserver with WD Red HDD's. They have been running 24/7 for 13 years without any problem.
If my Synology Nas, which I bought in 2021, tells me that my, much newer, WD Red will soon fail there, then I will replace them with new HDD's ... from Seagate!
I partially agree. A NAS drive should not be in trouble by just letting it run for 3 years. On the other hand, failure rates rise the longer the drive is running. 3 years is a bit short in my opinion and yes, they should put there much more reasonable numbers to it. But I think it is a good idea to show the user, that the drive is already running for quite some time. I would find the warning useful, if they ran already for 6 years or so.
On the other hand I must state that you didn't find any proof of any intention whatsoever. You found two localization files that are normally used to translate texts to different languages. The files do not configure the warning themself. They do not set the threshold to 3 years. It only states what text should be displayed, if the warning is issued.
The handbook of your car might contain a statement like: The timing belt should be replaced after xx thousand kilometers (your mileage might vary). That doesn't mean that it _is_ broken, but it _might_ be broken or break any time soon. The same is true for the harddrive. The warning states that the drive is in use for quite some time and might show failures soon. The warning text itself is absolute fine. But not the decision about the thresholds. In that we agree.
So I think proof would have been, if you showed the place where the WD tool is configured to issue the warning after 3 year of power on time.
Maybe fixed by Sinology? I could not find anything but the AutoSMART drive tests in Storage settings today. No WD tests that I could find. I looked since I too have WD Red drives. Buit won’t next time!
If this was on WD side, its unbelievable dumb business decision. If people have bad experiences/short life of hard drives people will stop buying them. They won't see many complaints online, just people will stop buying their product.
I had an 8TB just throw up a file system error, and yes, it just turned 3 years old too.
I used Stablebit 'Drivepool & Scanner' to look after my 2 DAS's.
They have 8 HDD's in them of all sizes & the Drivepool software handles the RAID part
So I have 16 HDD's all working as 1, going from 10TB to 3 TB; cool eh
Well the Scanner software said I had a system file error on one of my 8TB HDD's,
its power on hours is 26174; close enough to 3 years, but this HDD has a warranty of 2 years!
It is a Seagate Barracuda with SMR! The weird thing is, Scanner has SMART in it & it shows no faults!
I got CrystalDiskInfo portable up & running and it shows a healthy HDD with no SMART faults!
Why did Scanner show a fault? I have another HDD with 20 to reach 3 years & I have a 10TB HDD with over 3 years & no flags
The HDD with the error has the SMART OK on Power Cycle Count & Vendor Specific & Spin-Up Time.
The only thing down is Power-On hours (current 71, worst 71 & threshold 0)
Everything else in the SMART is fine, not bad for a Barracuda that is 3 years old
Weird eh? *There goes that X-Files music again*
imgur.com/a/mNQlWSO