Shit, I've got several HDDs that have 50k+ hours on them. Don't tell them they're old.
My Synology DS213 has two drives in it that are 10 years old. 24/7/365. 61000+ hours.
A bad PR move 3 years in the making. Shooting themselves in the foot from all the way back in 2020. Well done Western Digital.
It is fair warning. Comparing your average joe's pc to a cloud server storage solution is stupid. They should have everything saved in raid meaning they can lose several drives without losing any data. The home pc is fucked when the hard drive goes out. Recovering that data can be expensive.
Notification is fair enough.
If you're putting messages out that say "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" - that's just FUD. 3 years of on-time and warning of failure for a NAS-rated drive is a joke and is a deliberate attempt by WD to sell more drives.
I agree that their motivation is dubious. But not something to get upset over.
This is probably worse than the author realizes.
I imagine WD puts that automatic label on their HDDs because they practice Planned Obsolescence, and after 3 yeras the HDDs are designed to fail.
WD has always been funny about their drives. Remember the older "Green" drives that would park the head over and over? I had several die like that, did one last round of warranty on them and sold the lot because they kept sending me slightly larger drives each time.
I plan on never buying helium-filled drives. Atoms so small nothing can contain them long-term.
After this news, I'm never buying a WD drive again
I wonder if there are any non-jewed HDD manufacturers out there anymore.
Seagate was already pretty bad back then. What else do we have? Toshiba? Eh. Hitachi? Good luck finding one.
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