Technology
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
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.
"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.
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.
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!
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.
Wow. That's such a ridiculous oversight.
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.
Me with 2 WD HDDs and 2 Sandisk SD card: this is fine
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
I owned the 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
I email everything to myself like an old lady, and pay Google for extra storage. 🤫
I have a few different drives that I mirror my documents folder to, then upload the most important stuff to cloud too.
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.
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.
Happened to one of my passports. All wiped won't connect
I’ve got an older 500GB one that has been going strong for years. But yeah I just bought a Crucial
You keep using that word Extreme. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Extreme(ly unreliable)
Hynix Gold/Platinum are good, in case anyone is looking for replacements for their NVMe SSDs.