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What a terrible article.
“We had one drive failure… Everyone take out the pitchforks!”
Yeah no. Drive failures happen. Period. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q1-2023/
I understand that there was a firmware failure in the 4TB drives… but come on, there’s no journalistic integrity here to even CHECK what firmware the device was on? Nothing at all here substantial.
Further, you should be practicing 3-2-1 backups if the data is that important. It shouldn’t matter to you that one storage failed.
Yeah, I’m kind of torn on this one. On one hand, having a drive replaced for an issue, then having that replacement fail with the same issue (or at least same effect) reeks of problems. That probably warrants merit.
On the other hand, it does show they likely have poor data backup practices if losing a single hard drive is costing them 3TB data loss. Either they were recording a day’s worth of video and lost it, in which case that sucks but it happens, or they had a ton of other data that likely should have already been backed up elsewhere in which case I have little sympathy.
that replacement fail with the same issue
They said on the 4TB that singular files were being dropped/lost (likely hitting some magical number of files and oldest one falls out of controller memory or something stupid like that). This new one has the entire drive inaccessible completely. The 4TB makes sense as a firmware issue that was patched. The 3TB one sounds more like a controller failure IMO… I would call these different modes of failure. But there’s not a single shred of evidence that they’ve even looked at any of that. That’s my problem. There’s no journalistic work here except “see drive dead”. And if the 3TB failure is as I described… then it’s literally a “it happens”.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
This isn’t a drive he purchased many months or years ago — it’s the supposedly safe replacement that Western Digital recently sent after his original wiped his data all by itself.
SanDisk issued a firmware fix for a variety of drives in late May, shortly after our story.
But data recovery services can be expensive, and Western Digital never offered Vjeran any the first time it left him out to dry.
Honestly, it feels like WD has been trying to sweep this under the rug while it tries to offload its remaining inventory at a deep discount — they’re still 66 percent off at Amazon, for example.
Unfortunately, the broken state of the internet means Western Digital doesn’t have to work very hard to keep selling these drives.
I’d also like to say shame on CNET, Cult of Mac and G/O Media’s The Inventory for writing deal posts about this drive that don’t warn their readers at all.
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