Are Western Digital drives trustworthy these days.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

Are Western Digital drives trustworthy these days. If I want to buy a pretty big non-flash hard drive for "backup and throw in a drawer" purposes, is this a good choice

https://www.amazon.ca/Elements-Portable-External-Drive-WDBU6Y0050BBK-WESN/dp/B07X41PWTY

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@mcc yes (partly based on knowing people working for WD)

[dysfun@social.treehouse.systems]

@mcc they're a mixed bag. some are good, some aren't very good.

[ratsnakegames@mastodon.social]

@mcc with the addendum that sometimes people sell fakes on Amazon (more of a problem with flash media afaik), yeah, I'd trust them

(this is a general problem with storage on Amazon, not with WD in particular)

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@ratsnakegames Do I need to worry about this if the seller/shipper is amazon.ca?

[rotopenguin@mastodon.social]

@ratsnakegames @mcc I suppose the "fake" here would be "a drive that was retired from a datacenter, had its power on hours reset, and has a totally non-suspicious ten billion head un/loading events on it".

[arutaz@social.n2.mikronod.se]

@mcc I've had a few WD My Passport for some years and they have been wihtout problems

[ratsnakegames@mastodon.social]

@mcc If the seller is Amazon, no, you should be fine.

If Amazon is just shipping from their warehouse, vendors have managed to get fakes in there in the past.

[darkling@mstdn.social]

@mcc IIRC, WD have good hardware, but the firmwares can be dodgy. (There's a couple of specific versions that are known very bad).

Seagate have decent firmware, but the hardware has a tendency to go phut.

Not sure what the drawbacks of Hitachi are.

I tend to go for Hitachi or WD.

[Edit: This is for HDDs.]

[ratsnakegames@mastodon.social]

@rotopenguin @mcc in the flash/SSD space, the "fake" is usually "a 128MB flash drive with a controller that lies and claims to be 2TB large, then writes your data into nowhere, and also WD definitely didn't make it"

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@darkling if i am looking at a specific WD drive, is there a way of finding out if it's one with a dodgy firmware?

[cliftonr@wandering.shop]

@mcc

If you get the Western Digital "Red" product line of drives, which are officially blessed and branded for NAS use, they're very good and very stable.

I have found over time that across several manufacturers it's worth buying hard drives labeled for NAS use, because they seem to be built and tested to higher standards, so I now use them for backups as well.

[ratsnakegames@mastodon.social]

@rotopenguin @mcc anyway, you can avoid these if you pay attention (don't buy suspicious looking shit and look at the packaging carefully), and Amazon will generally refund them

[darkling@mstdn.social]

@mcc You can get the firmware number out of the SMART info. I don't think there's a published list of known bad drives (for reasons of avoiding lawsuits), but I can ask someone I know on the btrfs IRC channel who keeps such a list for work purposes.

Model number and firmware version, if you have hands on the specific device.

[rotopenguin@mastodon.social]

@ratsnakegames love seeing the 8TB Lenovo microSD cards on Aliexpress

[ratsnakegames@mastodon.social]

@rotopenguin yeah, like, ideally don't buy those

[grumpybozo@toad.social]

@mcc I’m pretty happy with the WD 5TB spinning rust that I use for backup. It has served me well for a few years.

[darkling@mstdn.social]

@mcc Hmm... just spotted that this is an external drive. Those have two additional problems: it connects via USB, which is often flaky and can drop writes if you have the wrong USB hardware on the host (or in the enclosure); and the model numbers on the wrapper don't necessarily correspond to the same drive model internally.

Anyway, I'll ask...

[schrotthaufen@mastodon.social]

@mcc I’ve only had WD drives die of old age. (As in several years actually powered on.)

[rotopenguin@mastodon.social]

@ratsnakegames there's another version of flash card fraud going around, cards that *do* possess the advertised size. These are included with a lot of emulation systems, I don't know if they have escaped containment into any other market yet.

The thing with them is, the cards come loaded with stuff, you can write to them somewhat, but they die from a wholesale rewrite. I suspect that they are leaving out the erase circuitry, for however much die space/process steps that saves.