I’ve been tracking a story about Western Digital for the last few days that broke via via Ars Technica. The story goes something like this:
As users have reported online, including on Synology-focused and Synology’s own forums, as well as on Reddit and YouTube, Western Digital drives using Western Digital Device Analytics (WDDA) are getting a “warning” stamp in Synology DSM once their power-on hours count hits the three-year mark. WDDA is similar to SMART monitoring and rival offerings, like Seagate’s IronWolf, and is supposed to provide analytics and actionable items.
The recommended action says: “The drive has accumulated a large number of power on hours [throughout] the entire life of the drive. Please consider to replace the drive soon.” There seem to be no discernible problems with the hard drives otherwise.
Synology confirmed this to Ars Technica and noted that the labels come from Western Digital, not Synology. A spokesperson said the “WDDA monitoring and testing subsystem is developed by Western Digital, including the warning after they reach a certain number of power-on-hours.”
There’s a couple of ways to look at this.
Let me start with the cynical view. I have zero issues with a hard drive giving you a warning if the drive is about to fail. Especially if you use it in a Network Attached Storage box or NAS like the ones that Synology makes as that is mission critical use case. And drives have had technology built into them to warn you of a potential failure for years. That tech is called SMART or Self Monitoring Analysis And Reporting Technology. But Western Digital’s tech that seems to be designed to throw up a warning after three years of usage. Which by some strange coincidence is around the time the warranty on a lot of these drives expire. That seems a bit “sus” to me. It’s almost as if Western Digital is trying to scare people into replacing drives to drive their revenue upwards.
Here’s the charitable view. There’s a figure called MTBF or Mean Time Between Failures. This is a statistical model that estimates the average life span of a hard drive. A lot of this depends on how you use the drive. The generally accepted MTBF figure that I’ve always seen is three to five years in terms of what users should expect. In a NAS environment, you’re likely to be closer to that three year end of the spectrum. Which means Western Digital warning you about the fact that the drive is over three years old may be a good thing as a surprising number of people have a tendency to not only install and forget about NAS boxes, but they don’t back them up either. Which means a drive failure can be catastrophic.
Pro Tip: You should back up your NAS either to an external drive on a frequent basis (as in at least monthly if not more frequently) and store that backup off site. Or you should use a service like BackBlaze to back up your NAS to the cloud.
If you want my personal opinion, I don’t think that Western Digital is doing anything wrong here. Though there is a part of me that thinks that this is still a bit “sus”. But what I do think is that they did a horrible job of explaining what WDDA does and why it’s potentially valuable to end users. Having said that, these issues would have likely gotten in the way of explaining that:
In short, it is possible that even if Western Digital did a better job of rolling WDDA out, nobody would trust them anyway because of the above issues. And that reflects poorly on Western Digital which in my mind means that they need to address not only this specific issue, but the trust that users have of their brand overall as clearly it’s pretty bad at the moment.
Now some people have recommended against buying Western Digital drives because of this. At the moment, I am continuing to recommend those drives to my clients. But I have to admit that when I replace my NAS later this year, I’ll be looking at installing Seagate drives because while I have not had any of my personal Western Digital drives fail, and only one client over the last decade or so has had a Western Digital drive fail, this whole controversy has made me broaden my horizons. And if I have a good experience with Seagate drives, I will likely start recommending them to my clients as well. Which I suspect is the last thing that Western Digital wants. But given the state of play at the moment, until they come out and address this head on and transparently, that’s what they are likely to get. I say that because I am unable to find any example where Western Digital has said anything about this in public. Perhaps they’re hoping that this issue simply goes away? Who knows? But I do know that companies that don’t deal with issues head on end up with a bad outcome at the end of the day. And Western Digital has to decide if that’s what they want.
Your move Western Digital.
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The Western Digital WDDA Controversy MAY Not Be As Shady As It Seems…. But Western Digital Needs To Fix How They’ve Handled This
I’ve been tracking a story about Western Digital for the last few days that broke via via Ars Technica. The story goes something like this:
As users have reported online, including on Synology-focused and Synology’s own forums, as well as on Reddit and YouTube, Western Digital drives using Western Digital Device Analytics (WDDA) are getting a “warning” stamp in Synology DSM once their power-on hours count hits the three-year mark. WDDA is similar to SMART monitoring and rival offerings, like Seagate’s IronWolf, and is supposed to provide analytics and actionable items.
The recommended action says: “The drive has accumulated a large number of power on hours [throughout] the entire life of the drive. Please consider to replace the drive soon.” There seem to be no discernible problems with the hard drives otherwise.
Synology confirmed this to Ars Technica and noted that the labels come from Western Digital, not Synology. A spokesperson said the “WDDA monitoring and testing subsystem is developed by Western Digital, including the warning after they reach a certain number of power-on-hours.”
There’s a couple of ways to look at this.
Let me start with the cynical view. I have zero issues with a hard drive giving you a warning if the drive is about to fail. Especially if you use it in a Network Attached Storage box or NAS like the ones that Synology makes as that is mission critical use case. And drives have had technology built into them to warn you of a potential failure for years. That tech is called SMART or Self Monitoring Analysis And Reporting Technology. But Western Digital’s tech that seems to be designed to throw up a warning after three years of usage. Which by some strange coincidence is around the time the warranty on a lot of these drives expire. That seems a bit “sus” to me. It’s almost as if Western Digital is trying to scare people into replacing drives to drive their revenue upwards.
Here’s the charitable view. There’s a figure called MTBF or Mean Time Between Failures. This is a statistical model that estimates the average life span of a hard drive. A lot of this depends on how you use the drive. The generally accepted MTBF figure that I’ve always seen is three to five years in terms of what users should expect. In a NAS environment, you’re likely to be closer to that three year end of the spectrum. Which means Western Digital warning you about the fact that the drive is over three years old may be a good thing as a surprising number of people have a tendency to not only install and forget about NAS boxes, but they don’t back them up either. Which means a drive failure can be catastrophic.
Pro Tip: You should back up your NAS either to an external drive on a frequent basis (as in at least monthly if not more frequently) and store that backup off site. Or you should use a service like BackBlaze to back up your NAS to the cloud.
If you want my personal opinion, I don’t think that Western Digital is doing anything wrong here. Though there is a part of me that thinks that this is still a bit “sus”. But what I do think is that they did a horrible job of explaining what WDDA does and why it’s potentially valuable to end users. Having said that, these issues would have likely gotten in the way of explaining that:
In short, it is possible that even if Western Digital did a better job of rolling WDDA out, nobody would trust them anyway because of the above issues. And that reflects poorly on Western Digital which in my mind means that they need to address not only this specific issue, but the trust that users have of their brand overall as clearly it’s pretty bad at the moment.
Now some people have recommended against buying Western Digital drives because of this. At the moment, I am continuing to recommend those drives to my clients. But I have to admit that when I replace my NAS later this year, I’ll be looking at installing Seagate drives because while I have not had any of my personal Western Digital drives fail, and only one client over the last decade or so has had a Western Digital drive fail, this whole controversy has made me broaden my horizons. And if I have a good experience with Seagate drives, I will likely start recommending them to my clients as well. Which I suspect is the last thing that Western Digital wants. But given the state of play at the moment, until they come out and address this head on and transparently, that’s what they are likely to get. I say that because I am unable to find any example where Western Digital has said anything about this in public. Perhaps they’re hoping that this issue simply goes away? Who knows? But I do know that companies that don’t deal with issues head on end up with a bad outcome at the end of the day. And Western Digital has to decide if that’s what they want.
Your move Western Digital.
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This entry was posted on June 14, 2023 at 11:16 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Western Digital. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.