Stop Buying WD NAS Drives.

that's it that is officially the last draw for me I am no longer going to recommend to pretty much anybody Western Digital NAS Drives period that is honestly the very last straw I'm willing to accept from this company because in the past just three years they've had numerous anti-consumer behavior that has been really bad and this one right here is probably the worst Western Digital has started using their Western Digital device analytics essentially it's a very similar to a Smart test except it's kind of done by them so the same thing that Seagate does with their Sega Iron Wolf test to start marking drives on a Synology Nas as warning if they have been powered on for only three years three years so now if you have Western Digital drives pretty much any of their NAS Drives it says the Western Digital purple red plus and red Pros if you've got Western Digital device analytics which you absolutely should disable in DSM if you have those enabled at the three year mark of your NAS Drives being powered on they will now permanently be marked as warning in DSM that means that if there's actually an issue like I don't know maybe you start having uncorrected sectors going up to 100 and it actually might be failing you're going to have no idea because Western Digital has decided that their NAS Drives apparently cannot handle being on for three years that's it that is all it is is three years of power on ours which is absolutely nothing to a NAS drive and honestly this is the last draw for me for this company people who know this channel know that I don't really spend a lot of time just bashing other products that's not really what I like doing if I don't like a product I tend to just not really review it or talk about it I really try not to be like just a negative person on the internet because I feel like it's already kind of flooded with that but this is one of those cases where I feel like you have to call the company out for it because this is not the first thing like that they've done many people will also remember about three years ago now Western Digital started shipping SMR drives as NAS Drives SMR drives are not good for Nas and they're not good for raid because they have really really really slow performance at random times and when you've got a raid if one drive has horribly slow performance the entire volume is going to be operating at that speed and so having an SMR Drive in a raid is a horrible idea and yet Western Digital silently started shipping these cheaper drives as Western Digital red drives and so it's like why would you do that you have a lineup of drives that are cheaper and they're fine as a desktop Drive where you're only ever really reading massive amounts of data to it generally and you really don't notice a Slowdown because it's just like an external cheap hard drive they have lineups for that but they started trying to put that in their NAS Drives even though people are buying Nast drives to put in a Nas and so with those fundamental issues there was no reason to ever put them in a Nas and yet Western Digital without telling anybody and also doing some very shady stuff where they were kind of hiding it and did not give a direct list of ones that are SMR or CMR started just shipping those until people found out because they were having a ton of issues ZFS boxes were especially hit by this because the re-silvering process on a ZFS pool could sometimes say hey that's having an issue and one calculation took over a year to rebuild tons and tons of issues that could have been alleviated by not shipping cheap SMR drives as a NAS drive so they added that they fixed that they started documenting that and now they're doing this so that is just something that really bothers me my core because it's one of those things that is just anti-consumer it is really making E-Waste out of drives that should last at least twice that long without thinking twice about them all right so before we can go too much further in this video I need to kind of give my biases and where I'm coming from nobody's paid me for this video no company has a clue that I'm making this there are only three people who know I'm making this video at all myself my wife and actually one of my clients who is the first person who I've seen have this issue he emailed me and said hey uh all my drives just went into warning mode Western Digital says they've been powered on for too long and should probably be replaced that's the first time I heard of this those are the only three people who know about this video nobody's paying for me or anything like that I have gotten free Hardware from Synology and I've gotten three free hard drives from Synology as their Synology drives and then I've gotten free hard drives from Seagate but indirectly through other companies Seagate has never directly sent me them a lot of companies partner with Seagate I've spent way more money on Seagate hard drives than I've gotten in free Seagate hard drives but I want to make that clear I have gotten free Seagate hard drives not directly from them but just people who send me an ass that's fully built out just wanted to get that very clear all the way though no money's changing hands for this video and nobody's going to see it beforehand and nobody gets input beforehand or even though they exist alright so now with all those disclaimers out of the way I want to go ahead and pull up pretty much the only Post online that I found about this and it should be a way bigger deal than this so this is from about two months ago which makes sense why I've not seen a ton of stuff online about it is because it looks like they just pushed this and apparently what has happened is Western Digital device analytics has started flagging NAS Drives any of their Western Digital purple red plus and red Pros as warning if they have been powered on for more than three years of power on hours and that's it it does not look at any of the smart tests it does not look at any reallocated sectors it looks at nothing else other than the power on hours to go ahead and flag those devices this is horrible because all it is doing is creating E-Waste for perfectly good hard drives so for those of you who don't really know NAS Drives are designed to run 24 7. that's just why you buy NAS drive is they're designed to run 24 7 and they generally have vibration sensors to keep harmonics from happening too easily when you've got a bunch of drives next to each other the actual designs run 24 7 and three years is nothing in a lifetime of a hard drive especially if you're getting NAS Drives and so if you look at the backblaze annualized failures they have things that have been running for 92 months and are fine you can see that really even with a lot of the drives that are 92 months old so what is that over seven and a half years old their annualized failure report is less than one percent so you can see from this data hard drives should be totally fine with three years of power on hours that's only 36 months and the majority of these are well well over that and the ones that are not like the 16s are just because drives have not existed that long to get those hours it's one of those things that you do not need to worry about your nav's drives failing because they've been powered on for three years the only thing that's running out is Western digital's warranty and my biggest problem with this is it actually worked so this right here was his system where he powered it on and all of a sudden all of his drives went into warning mode he immediately goes in and bought new Western Digital drives as he sent me an email just because hey it's his entire business on there it's crucial for him I totally get that if something says warning I'm going to go ahead and replace it just to make sure there's not fail but that was just because Western Digital decided that hey three years we can probably sell more hard drives by then even though there's no reason to believe that these drives are failing I have a huge issue with this so now let's talk about how you can hopefully get around this if you have Western Digital drives already in your system essentially in DSM unfortunately I cannot show these settings because well I do not have a Western Digital drive with me and what you should do is you go into storage manager and then you go into HDD sdd and settings right here there should be a button in here somewhere that says do you want to enable Western Digital Analytics you are going to want to uncheck that smart tests should you have you covered and so I would not recommend enabling that because there is no useful information from saying hey your drives have been powered on for three years I'm just going to set everything to warning so you don't realize that there's actually an issue coming if this happens to you and they're already marked like that I would sleep fine at night having those but you're going to want to check your smart data fairly often just because now all of your warnings are going to be watered down because your all your drives are going to show as warning and I'm pretty sure it's going to show your pool as warning as well and it may even not allow you to use that drive to rebuild another actually failing drive because it has been marked because I also believe hot spares are going to be counting towards power on ours because they're kept spinning the entire time just so they don't basically fail as soon as you try to use them and so what may happen is your hot spare may fail to actually rebuild your pool I've not tested this but it may not be allowed to rebuild your pool because Western Digital has marked it as warning and I don't know if Synology will let you repair a pool with a drive marked as warning Western Digital please disable that set it to seven years set it to actually something that is realistic for hey this drive has been around for a while or maybe set it to something that's actually useful like hey we have found that after X Y and Z smart tests to show that these three parameters are getting high then it might fail you know that would be useful for an extra test directly from Western Digital or Seagate instead Western Digital is simply marking these as fail just because they reach a certain threshold which I really just cannot accept as normal business practice so I guess this is the end of my rant I really just am not going to be able to recommend Western Digital drives for any NASA's anytime soon unless this gets cleaned up it would be different if this was the very first issue that had come up in the last couple of years but it's simply not and so I really hope that Western Digital will push an update that changes this to a much more useful thing because marking drives as dying just because they are three years old is only producing E-Waste and basically corporate profits and I just cannot sit well with that behavior going on all right well that's gonna be it for this video um please put down the comments below any of your experiences with this and if you were able to get that unmarked I've not found a way to do that yet and from my experience in DSM it can be very very very tough to unmark drive please Western Digital remove this Synology you could also remove that just because this is blatant bad behavior by a hard drive manufacturer that is exploiting the tests within DSM to just try to make people buy more drives all right that's gonna be it for this thank y'all hopefully this gets resolved and I will be updating the comments below if this does get resolved thank you all right bye [Music]

Channel: SpaceRex

Views: 187,052

Keywords:

Id: cLGi8sPLkLY

Length: 11min 58sec (718 seconds)

Published: Mon May 29 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/NoLateArrivals]

I run a bunch both of Seagate and WDred, all of them older than 3 years.

None failed so far, none is giving weird warnings.

[u/Iamgalavanter]

Think about the businessman who called SpaceRex to alert him to this. The guy naturally was unnerved by the warning, and ended up actually buying new WD drives. Exactly the outcome WD is hoping for, their customers replacing perfectly good drives!

It's funny, I bought my first NAS two weeks ago, a Synology 923+. Being new to all this, I read about the Synology hdd "compatibilty" warnings in DSM. I knew I'd not like to see them, so I made sure to get "compatible" drives, 4 8TB WD Red Plus.

Thankfully, I see no WD analytics on DSM 7.1.1. I'll be checking when I upgrade to 7.2.

[u/Final_Alps]

This is shady. I want to emphasise that. But this seems to apply only to three specific models of WD drives and Synology boxes from the 21 series and before - seems Synology has yanked this test from recent boxes.

posting KB article link shortly.

Edit: link:

https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/Which_Synology_NAS_supports_WDDA

• ⁠Red Pro — 12 TB — WD121KFBX - 68EF5N0
  
• Red Plus — 12 TB — WD120EFAX - 68UNTN0
• ⁠Purple — 8 TB — WD82PURZ - 85TEUY0.

[u/tripdaddykane]

I am a WD fan since I have had so many Seagate models fail on me within 3 years. If a WD drive fails, it fails, I'm not going to care about the warnings. That's why I have hyperbackup so that I can restore it. I understand what he's saying but anything but Seagate is my motto. Yes it is still messed up what WD is doing. edit: This guy is the man, he has helped me with his synology guide countless times along with mariushosting.

[u/RJM_50]

I haven't seen that WDDA tab with my Synology DS920+ NAS full of 8TB Western Digital Red drives. Even looking at the exact same Drive Health Info tab. I only have: * Overview * S.M.A.R.T. * History

No Western Digital Device Analytics, is WDDA an option coming with DSM 7.2?

"Notes: WDDA is only available on DSM 7.0 and above, and only on specific Synology NAS models released before the 22-series." We need more information than Synology has listed and this single situation he's encountered.🤷🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️

[u/Sulla123]

So I have a 1821+ running the latest dam 7.1 (haven't updated to 7.2 yet) and all 8 drives are WD reds (cmr drives). I have to say that I cannot find the settings SpaceRex is talking about. When I go to Storage manager and click on settings, there is not WD Analytics options across all my drives. So not sure what's going on there....is t only on 7.2 that you see these options?

Anyone else?

[u/binarydays]

If true then this is a very strange marketing strategy!

If I’m such a company shouldn’t I be bragging about how long my drives outlast the competition. And if I’m such a company using this tactics shouldn’t I be worried that my customers will throw the towel when they see that my products started failing –because that's my interpretation of the message if I ever see one– in such a short time (relatively speaking ) and change brands!

[u/BigTulsa]

Stopped buying the Reds 7 years ago when I had THREE of them fail on me within a week. They were all part of a 4 disk SHR volume in my DS416j. I backed up the absolute essentials to a 3TB WD portable drive until I could get replacements (I got some HGST Ultrastars to replace them). I'll never buy another WD drive again. And yes, I realize HGST is essentially WD since they bought them in 2012, but their WD branded drives are junk. To me at least.

[u/ericsan007]

Thanks for the video OP. I found it in one of my clients using DS1621XS+ and WD121KFBX. I disable the WDDA option now.