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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.
Wow. That’s such a ridiculous oversight.
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.
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.
You are on a trip to disaster. Trust me, I do this for a living. One day you’re going to have a horrible surprise. I once had a guy get fired right there on a support call with me, he lost years worth of data because he wasn’t following good archival processes.
For consumer stuff:
- Buy a cheap NAS, plenty out there. Even one with just two drives is better than nothing (that’s what I do). Splurge and get one that does RAID-5, you’ll thank me one day. By the way, I’ve used WD stuff for a long time, and it’s been the most reliable in my experience even though their customer service is a shit show to deal with. 1a. A cheaper, but less effective option, just buy two drives and see if your BIOS supports RAID (most modern motherboards do). If not, well you can do it in you OS too, but hardware RAID is always better.
- Subscribe to a service like Google Drive, or One Drive, or Dropbox, or whatever you prefer. If you’re uncomfortable about putting stuff in the cloud then encrypt it first (VeraCrypt, GPG4Win, Password protected ZIP files even).
If you are running a business, definitely go with a good NAS, AND buy a tape library and get into a routine of rotating out the tapes and storing them off site (tapes are no use to you if your building get broken into, or burns down). And, use cloud storage too.
Just a point of clarification: Don’t use RAID 5 for more than 2-4 TB. The rebuild takes so long that the mean-time-between read errors statistic basically guarantees a read error while rebuilding, which may cause the controller to trash the array.
That and rebuilding that much data might push one of the drives over the edge anyway.
UNRAID for larger amounts?
Use a service like backblaze
I’m a pro photographer and Backblaze has saved my butt multiple times.
Checked it out and (at least on mobile), you can’t even see what the pricing is like. Seems aimed more at businesses as well.
They do offer personal back up. Can do it fully encrypted too. Price used to be $6/month… is now $9/month, but if you prepay for 12 months then they tend to cut you more of a deal.
Can complain about the price, but the fact is hard drives also cost money and you basically never have to worry about losing your stuff. Even if you have hard drives, it could all be wiped out in a fire. Cloud has its advantages.
My Internet is fast enough where I think cloud storage would be reasonable.
Basically, you run their program and it automatically backs up any new changes on your machine
I email everything to myself like an old lady, and pay Google for extra storage. 🤫
I have a rack in my garage, all my servers and my gaming rig are in it - fiber cables run through my attic to my office to connect the front end of my gaming rig (monitor and usb c hub with peripherals).
My domain and all of my services are either VM’s on vmware or xcp-ng, or dockers on a VM. It’s all VM’s, except for the gaming rig and the Veeam backup server - they are bare metal.
VMware VM’s are backed up with Veeam to a bare metal windows 2019 backup server (because its backup its the only bare metal server in the rack). First copy goes to internal RAID5 array. Second copy goes to ISCSI target that is netgear NAS in RAID5. Third copy goes to Wasabi.
Most docker data is on the docker VM’s themselves, but if i need to mess with the data on the docker, that data is on a RAID5 Synology NAS. This gets backed up to Wasabi via duplicati. The system backup for the bare metal backup server also gets duplicati’ed to wasabi to make recovery from a site level disaster a little bit easier.
Everything XCP-NG gets backed up first copy to an UnRaid NAS with 2 parity disks, then copied to Wasabi. I will eventually get a second local target - I have some promising candidates in the shop, I just need time to diagnose and repair them.
Every Windows server and my gaming rig gets backed up direct to cloud with Redstor since I have extra space in the NFR bucket where I work and I manage that product. Gaming rig has no other backup so that’s nice (most game installs not backed up but everything else is). Other windows servers are backed up either via the Veeam chain or the XCP-NG chain, but it’s nice to have a secondary backup. I would do the Linux ones as well but Redstor sucks with Linux right now and it’s not worth the hassle.
Plex media is on another UnRaid box with 2 parity drives, but no other backup. This content can all be re-downloaded via automated systems if the array ever fails. I have had the hardware that data is on fail several times but it’s always been recoverable, knock on wood.
I am slowly working on phasing out VMware/Veeam in favor of XCP-NG, but it’s a long process.
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.
Once in a blue moon I’ll copy over files
So later this week?
I am terrible at it too, but slowly getting better. I have recently set up restic to automatically run daily backups from a digital ocean droplet where I’m hosting my website to my home NAS. It’s a great tool, it can encrypt data, send it to a remote location and it does incremental backups so it doesn’t take up that much space.
Long term, my plan is to do a similar setup to back up important data to a cloud (probably a separate digital ocean server). Of course, I won’t be backing up my Linux distros, only the important stuff like documents, photos, personal projects.
I’m also considering using blu-ray discs. They are convenient, can store large amounts of data (well… for me 25GB is a lot), are offline physical discs that don’t degrade that easily if properly stored. Also, once burned they are read only which is great for backups.
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 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.
I’m a Linux guy. My media library lives on spinning rust drives in my NAS. The original CDs/DVDs/Blu-Rays etc. are one backup, a copy on a USB HDD serves as another. Most personal files on my computer are synched to my laptop and/or phone via Syncthing. This isn’t strictly speaking a “backup” but it is a redundancy that can survive some failures. I back up my desktop nightly via BackInTime (a front-end for rsync) to one of three external USB hard disks. I cycle through these drives weekly, the freshest one goes to my parents’ house as an offsite backup (I store his off-site backups as well). Applications and Software, I use a tool provided by my distro which essentially keeps a list of the installed packages, which can then be bulk-installed by my distros package manager. I don’t really bother trying to archive my applications or take full image backups of my system because I’ve found just doing a fresh install and then restoring a backup isn’t much slower or more complicated.
ALL of my backups are done locally. I use no cloud services, and those hard drives me and my father swap as off-site backups are transported physically.
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.
I’m using vorta with borgbackup. It’s a set and forget solution with very reasonable pricing. Saved my ass a few times already.
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.
windows built it backup is actually ok, you can specify which folders are backed up and how often
i use nas, just an old computer running linux in my laundry room with a bunch of drives that i save everything to, and backup everything monthly to a drive i keep in my drawer and a second drive i keep in my locker at work
easiest is probably to get an external drive and copy everhing to it periodically, keeping it unplugged so youre safe from virus, accidental deletion, power supply failing and frying it, lightning things like that
I have a few different drives that I mirror my documents folder to, then upload the most important stuff to cloud and thumb drive too.
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.
Happened to one of my passports. All wiped won’t connect
That’s all US lawsuits - any I should know about in the EU?
Wondering as well.
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
