- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
Anyone else have a similar experience with one of these drives?
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What the fuck are all these comments?
It’s an article about an unresolved and recurring problem with a popular drive that the ostensibly reputable manufacturer is trying to hide.
But 90% of the comments are people jerking themselves off about how smart they are for using RAID, which is irrelevant to the point of the article… But never miss an opportunity to pleasure yourself in public I guess?
Lemmy definitely showing the same symptoms as Reddit as it grows. Too many people trying to show off how technically smart they are and just come off as obnoxious dweebs
It’s becoming more and more noticeable and it’s making me sad.
The thing is, there’s nothing wrong with sharing knowledge or pointing out best practices. What sucks is people replying JUST to point out the flaws and then gloat, without even fully comprehending what happened in the article. But this behavior has been around way longer than reddit.
I feel it’s the same kind of people who complain regarding the same questions popping up at a forum often. I don’t get why they can’t just ignore them? Sure you could maybe find the answer by googling but sometimes you want to interact with others. Plus you might learn things you didn’t know you should also have asked.
My feeling is that Stackexchange is the place that has taken this the furthest with the result that new people can neither ask any questions nor get any points to get more rights on the site.
Yes, More opinions always lead to better decisions
It think it has always been there, it’s part of the internet and tech culture. Lemmy is not going to magically change that. We can try to make it better by writing good contributions and supporting those who do.
Lemmy guess… this is your 2nd go with a social media platform?
Lemmy sit you down on my knee son and let grandpa here explain how social media worked in his old times of facebook just like I sat on my grandpappys knee and he explained to me the days of AIM.
/s
Lemmy stop you right there—
And what’s most important is you putting smart people down to make yourself feel superior to them
You’ve been putting people down everywhere, quite hypocritical of you
How else are they supposed to show off how much smarter they are than those grubby redditors?
This is one the best uses of irony (probably unintentional or trolling) I’ve ever seen. Thanks
They sure are, bro. They sure are
I didn’t believe you but yeeeeeesh. Lots of self righteous penises ITT. If people buy an expensive hard drive, it should work. Not everyone knows everything there is to know about data storage, have a little grace people
What, you don’t do RAID-6 and carry around 5 external USB drives to move your data between locations? It’s just so convenient. 🤣
Seriously, I don’t get the raid comments at all.
Of course I don’t carry 5 external drives with me all the time, that would be ridiculous.
I carry the whole HBA.
Every1s doing it
Lol this place is half a circle jerk of people who think they’re certified geniuses for rejecting mainstream technology, tech hipsters. There was a thread about Google’s “safe browsing” thing and most of the comments were just "iMaGiNe UsInG gOoGle!!*
My only counter argument is that the verge article should also have stuck to the failures/defect, and either not mentioned their own dataloss, or at least mention possible mitigation strategies. I understand not everyone can do proper backups, but the verge can, and they should lead by example.
As for a comment on the actual drive defect, this is probably one of those cases where you want to insist on a refund. If the problem is as widespread as claimed, then getting a new defective drive doesn’t really help. WD/sandisk should just be recalling and refunding all devices. It’s odd that tech stuff never seems to have recalls in the same way that cars do? They seem to just rely on individual RMAs.
Aren’t usually recalls mostly for cases where it would cause personal injuries and as such the damages to the company are far bigger than not doing the recall.
Yeah it’s probably a risk/damages calculation. But imagine if WD had simply recalled all affected devices. Might mitigate some of the PR damage?
Why is your comment with so many upvotes but I still had to scroll down to find it. Everything above is kinda morbid. Im glad I scrolled enough, was worried a bit 🤣
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Showing off my superior intellect is always relevant!
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Did you read the article? Because as far as I can see it fails to actually say shit about the problem. From just this article I can see why people are blaming the author for not having redundancy.
The Arstechnica articles however do actually say what’s going on, so yeah this appears to be a real issue with these drives disconnecting.
Yes.
But never miss an opportunity to pleasure yourself in public I guess?
I mean I wasn’t really in the mood but I’ll rub one out just for you
irrelevant to the point of the article
What are you talking about? Of course it’s relevant.
Hard drives are unreliable, they always have been and they probably always will be.
I’ve personally had three drives fail in the last 12 months - two HDDs and one SSD. And both of those were internal hard drives either in a data center or at least on a desk in a properly climate controlled office. All three of them were from far more reputable manufacturers than WD. I suspect none of those failures were the actual disk by the way pretty sure they were all chipset or firmware failures.
Your solution doesn’t have to be RAID, but it has to be something better than “I’ll just keep this file on a single drive”.
WD should absolutely do better - but at the same time even if they did do better it still wouldn’t be good enough. There shouldn’t be any data loss when (not if) a drive fails.
Then the article title should be less click bait termed and properly address that there’s a major firmware fault in the drives.
Journalism is lost on generating clicks and user turmoil rather than servicing the public in any way.
The article does exactly that.
Or read the article instead of just the headline.
I read the article, it’s also shit and fails to properly talk about the issue instead of ranting about data loss.
Or maybe people should actually read articles first instead of commenting based off just reading the “click bait“ headline?
are we not allowed to comment on the meta of the article as well as the substance of the article? i guess we need to stop complaining about paywalls and excessive inline ads too then
Yeah, because that’s exactly what I said, clearly. 🙄
This is exactly why I invested 250x the cost of one SSD into my raid setup. It’s 100 SSD’s in raid1 in a huge rack which slides vertically on 4 guide poles.
I sit under the contraption and lean forward as far as I can, before lowering it onto my back. This method allows me to suck my own cock with ease, so that I don’t need to fellate myself on public forums
so that I don’t need to fellate myself on public forums
But you still do anyway, because you like the way it feels
But he doesn’t HAVE TO
No. He doesn’t NEED to.
Big difference. He can. And he probably also has to, but he just doesn’t NEED to.
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.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Good bot.
redundancy is key
redundancy is key
redundancy is key
Even more redundancy
LOL
Ugh, I literally just fucking bought this drive
I almost bought one because they were on huge sale at Amazon.
Yeah, I wouldn’t suggest buying the huge sales at amazon for ssd’s.
They probably pulled the bad drives back from merchant stock to avoid getting returns. Those frequently wind up on Amazon as huge sales.
You’re probably fine, all drives have failures and I haven’t seen anything to indicate this is a widespread issue with the drive.
The manufacturer has acknowledged it’s an issue and has issued at least one patched firmware. This isn’t a “luck of the draw” or isolated issue.
So my serial number says I don’t need the patch. So hopefully I’m fine.
I’ve been telling people for years that the entire 21st century is at risk of being a lost century. Even personally I can’t guarantee my data will be with me 20 years from now even though I back it up. If you care about a photo or document, print it and throw it it a box. As I get older I find more of an obsession with physical media from a preservation point of view. Because I know my books and pictures will be around 50 years from now. Digital files not so much.
I used to think this, but now, less so.
I agree with you in general, as most people don’t use physical media. However, those of us that do, are probably pretty secure in our legacy.
I have digital files that have been with me for over a quarter of a century, first through repeated copies to new media formats, then to more sophisticated backup systems. In the past few years, I’ve been alternating backing up to cloud services and then to local USB disks; the backup program is a statically compiled, monolithic program with few dependencies. Recently, I found a solution to the encrypted restore by survivors. I even have a README with instructions.
I’m secure in the knowledge that my 3TB of painstakingly curated collection of foot porn will be available to future researchers, for the betterment of mankind.
Thank you for your service !
We’re in the presence of greatness 🫡
Redundancy. I have 4 drives and the older two drives are always a backup of music and media. I can lose all the save games and softwares since they’ll be outdated anyways but memories need to be preserved.
The kind of media I don’t have backup of is from my Handycam tapes since they no longer make the software and I don’t know how to digitize them in any other way.
The kind of media I don’t have backup of is from my Handycam tapes since they no longer make the software and I don’t know how to digitize them in any other way.
Do this if desperate, but see below first:
Magnetic tape cassettes? Are they standard? Then just stick them in an audio player and record the signal— Or actually, they’re probably 8mm, or DV, or something— So then rip the reader head out of an audio player, scroll through the tape at a constant rate, and digitize that signal (for as many tracks as needed). Don’t do anything silly, like using too much force or sticking too strong a magnet next to them, of course. As long as you’ve got the signal, you can worry about decoding it later if you lose the originals— Get some nerdy college student to figure it out, or wait for someone else with the same problem to post their GIT repository.Easier: Check if the Internet Archive has a copy of the software. It looks like they have quite a few Sony Handycam CDROMs. Maybe you’ll find a compatible model. Run it on an old Windows VM or computer if you need. “No longer make the software” sounds odd; Software like that is made once and then distributed.
(Or: Presumably you can still watch the tapes? Does the camera not have video output that you pass through some sort of capture box? — Though that of course would be lossy.)
Or: Wikipedia suggests the “Handycam” brand was used for multiple format standards, like “Video8” or “Hi8” or whatever. So just search Nile.com (or your personal favourite exploitation-powered online storefront) for “NameOfFormat Digitizer”, and wait for the order to to arrive. Here’s a couple articles from the first search results: IndieWire, VHSConverters. Here’s a machine that supports a couple formats, and has licensed a very reputable brand KodakPhotoPlus. And here’s a service that will apparently do it for you: LegacyBox. — Pricey, maybe, but how much time and money are you already spending, and how much are the tapes worth to you?
Thanks, i think the archive + vm would work. What I meant was there’s no modern software that supports current gen OS.
I’m not in the US so legacy box is out, thanks for sharing. I finally found a way
I’ve been telling people for years that the entire 21st century is at risk of being a lost century. Even personally I can’t guarantee my data will be with me 20 years from now even though I back it up. If you care about a photo or document, print it and throw it it a box. As I get older I find more of an obsession with physical media from a preservation point of view. Because I know my books and pictures will be around 50 years from now. Digital files not so much.
LOCKSS and KISS, though. Flash chips don’t last forever but are pretty durable, and so are optical media as long as they’re the right material. SSDs decay and HDDs fail, but for magnetic platter media even if the head or motor crashes there’s always the old magnetic microscope in a pinch. USB’s not going anywhere, and if you have four or five copies that you don’t completely neglect and don’t store in the same physical place, presumably you’ll have the chance to notice and take corrective measures if any of them start failing or are at risk.
I don’t actually know that an individual book or picture will still be around in 50 years; Fire, flooding, insects, acidic paper, low-quality ink maybe— Digital stuff’s fragile, but so is physical stuff. Stick it in the attic, and the heat’ll speed up any chemical reactions and probably make it cozier for insects; Stick it in the basement, and the condensation will get you mildew and rot. By contrast, having a flash drive accidentally survive a trip through a washer and dryer is a pretty common occurrence, and I’ve yet to lose a drive even with that level of negligence. Material compatibility’s one of the very most basic parts of a set of very precise manufacturing techniques, tin whiskers seem pretty rare these days, the really scarily insidious stuff like hydrogen embrittlement is super improbable, and most biological forms of decay haven’t adapted to eating cured epoxy and monocrystalline silicon yet.
At least I sorta know how a flash cell or hard drive platter is meant to be structured; Who knows what weird organic reactions and unstable or slowly diffusing molecules are happening in the pile of chemical pigments on a sheet of likely-acidic bleached cellulose and cheap ink or toner, and whether it will still be legible to human eyes in however many years? Plus, a printed photo or document starts fading the very instant it’s created, and it gets a little worse every time you touch it with sweaty human hands or look at it while exhaling moist human breath and corrosive enzymatic saliva droplets under a white LED lamp or G-type star shooting out ionizing UV rays. Digital failures tend to be catastrophic, but at least up until the moment it fails, you can make sure that it is the exact same picture or text— And you can make many, many copies very cheaply, all of them very physically durable compared to paper, and know that they are all the exact same picture and text.
That said, I absolutely agree with your overall assessment that most of the information in the early 21st century, including most of the public Internet/WWW, most likely either will be or already is… Maybe not technically lost, per se, given how much caching and saving happens on private clients, but certainly rendered inaccessible.
Ideally I’d really love to see a return of microfiche, actually, using modern polymers and metallization. I’ve been meaning to look into that for a while now. At a reasonable scale for optical viewing, you could fit… much, much more content than you might expect, and do it several times over, in an entirely reasonable number of pages. Your comment actually spurred me to finally think of a practical way of printing that— for years before, I’d been trying to idly figure out a process based on photomasks and nanoparticles suspended in resin, which had always felt like a very messy and tricky idea, but I just thought of another idea– So thanks for providing some inspiration there.
This is a hot take
Even data from the Apollo missions was found to be either degrading (tapes) or the formats were forgotten and the systems that could read them were gone. They had to do research into rediscovering how to read the data and hunt around for the few antique systems remaining to read the tapes.
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The Apollo mission data and BBC TV recordings weren’t considered important enough at the time to preserve them, it wasn’t until decades later that people realized they were but by then the BBC had destroyed or overwritten much of them and NASA had forgotten how to read much of the data. Then there was the notorious loss of many master recordings by great artists in a fire because the company was just too cheap and lazy to store them properly.
PCM, ASCII, and straight RGBA bitmap encodings aren’t going anywhere. By extension, derived formats like WAV, UTF-8, and word processor files and webpage HTML are mostly fine too. The formats are structurally simple enough that even if the associated file extensions were somehow to be forgotten, all you’d need to do to invent them again is hand the file to a bored nerd over the weekend.
I think you kinda got the BBC and NASA problems backwards. The BBC’s had a couple of prominent incidents where digital “preservation” that was supposed to be eternal couldn’t even be opened anymore after a couple of years, like their Domesday Book/Project application thingy. They’ve also lost a bunch of old shows, like early Dr. Who episodes, I think. NASA didn’t just forget how to read the Apollo tapes; they overwrote them to reuse the tapes, as was their standard practice at the time. The original signal and tapes were very HD (or analog), but most of the videos we have today are from the TV camera that they pointed at their own TV screen last-minute when they realized they didn’t have an adapter for broadcast— The equivalent of a grainy cell phone photo of a screenshot, basically.
The BBC and NASA incidents happened in an era before computers were a ubiquitous commodity product. So, everyone and their cat was basically inventing their own obscure single-implemention proprietary file formats at that time. Nowadays we have established technical standards, as well as formats that have already sorta stood the test of time based on their utility and simplicity— and millions of people who already know how to read them— so that particular vector for bitrot isn’t really as much of an issue anymore.
…That said, I think I sorta missed your point. What you’re really saying is that stewardship of digital records is much trickier and riskier than stewardship of physical records— and that results in stuff being lost. And that is absolutely true.
There is a will but there aren’t enough people with enough brain power to actually do the steps needed. Should it endure? I don’t know, maybe the last few decades should be forgotten.
Mistakes are usually the stuff that should be remembered
Fair
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Crazy how a single event sometimes reminds people of bigger problems, huh?
Digital media, where we store basically everything we care about, is hugely, hugely volatile, unreliable, and fragile. But you never notice it until you’re reminded of it, and then you really notice it. This story reminded people of it.
The reminder to stay grounded is probably also healthy, but I do think you’re missing the point of this comment thread.
I was today years old when I learned places like TheVerge are filled with idiots who keep work on USB media, keep no backups, and act like it’s not their fault when something fails.
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Vox Media was the owner since the beginning. The founders of The Verge went to the owner of SB Nations after leaving Engadget. It is part of Vox Media since the beginning.
They also think it’s newsworthy when they experience one hardware failure. How nice to have a platform to shout your own personal grievances from.
iVerge has been on the decline for nearly a decade now.
I’m surprised anyone takes them seriously at this point.
Randomly disconnects = chance for data loss
Though the filesystem plays a role. I have a full metal body Sandisk USB stick that still overheats after a while and then disconnects (has a heatsink on top now) but ext4 handles that fine. I know that Fat32 has no journaling and NTFS is a tad bit sensible to disconnects. Don’t know about exfat.
My external SSD I put together with a “nice” enclosure started dropping to 5MB/s on any machine. I don’t trust most external SSDs anymore.
I DO trust my RPi case with built-in m.2 USB adapter thingy, as it’s running full speed in that thing, no issues with speed dropping.
I’d like to know more about this adapter thingy.
Oh it’s AMAZING. It’s an expensive case for the Raspberry Pi 4 models, called Argon. It’s 45USD or so. BUT! It CHANGES THE SHITTY MICRO HDMI PORTS INTO TWO REAL HDMI PORTS!
It also has a little slot for an m.2 SSD inside it, and a tiny USB connector to make it work with a Pi. You can super easily boot from SSD and use a microsd as extra storage. It’s like 10x faster than microSD, it’s wild.
I had bought a different case (that honestly I love) but when I read about this one, I fell in love. Only problem is it only takes SATA m.2 drives, which happened to be the kind in my shitty enclosure.
I did something similar and use these UGreen enclosures with an M.2 on each RPi in my cluster. You can easily use these as portable media with whatever SSD you want.
Sorry, on mobile and have no idea how to strip the Amazon link properly. This is the older model I got.
You can buy straight from them as well. Never had an issue with any of their products. https://www.ugreen.com/collections/hubs-docks/products/ugreen-m-2-nvme-sata-ssd-enclosure-reader?variant=39915665129534
It’s my biggest peeve with owning this SSD. I can leave it over a weekend and come back to, no lie, 50+ disconnect notifications from MacOS. Shoddy software to say the least…
Ok, that’s far too much.
I use an Asus enclosure and put in a WD ssd. The heat dissipation is better than the sandisk model and it stays connected pretty much always except during travels
Eh, wait, so it’s heath related? Defective firmware causing overheating or too low limits?
Haven’t had that issue, but definitely design related. Mine is a Asus rog enclosure which has better heatsink than sandisk
It’s funny how the loss of storage space can be valued diffently. If it’s 3TB of of video footage for a newspaper, that’s weeks if not months of work and money lost. But it could also just be the last 3 Call of Duty’s with patches.
Just throwing this out there for anyone shopping for storage drives. BackBlaze does a pretty good regular writeup on the drives they use and how they perform, how reliable they are, etc. It’s very informative and a fun read (if you’re into nerdy stuff).
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q2-2023/
So they just had this one drive fail and they decided to make a big news article about it? Hardware fails sometimes. Just RMA the thing and shut the fuck up about it. Go build a gaming PC.
Did you read the article? Two drives, not one. In 3 months. By the same company. Who is aware of a problem, is trying to hide it, and pushed a firmware update that did not work. Also this second drive was a “safer” replacement the company sent the guy after the first one failed. I say an article about the whole situation is fully warranted
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Go build a gaming PC.
Don’t forget the table and to use a Swiss Army knife that hopefully has a screwdriver in it.
Ragebait articles generate a lot of clicks ig.
Dude, I think you’re way too into the tech space if you think a website publishing an article about some bad ssds can be misconstrued as rage bait.
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Someone didn’t read the story. This is about a known firmware fault that the company is doing its best not to keep quiet. Don’t help them in that work
They should’ve made a better headline
They included a large number of words after the headline that expound on the topic.
This concept is revolutionary! What should we call this new form of information delivery?
Yeah but the headline should let me know what the story is and make me interested. Not make me think the author is complaining that their SSD died.
I don’t care about that. I don’t want to read an article about that.
People downvoting you are the same people who complain about clickbait. A good headline should give you a good idea about content of an article. I don’t have time to read 50 articles a day.
Fuck nuance!
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There is absolutely nothing to say that the author didn’t have it backed up. He still lost 3TB of files from a new drive which was a replacement sent by the company, with a known fault supposedly fixed.
“Herp derp he should have backed up” is not the takeaway here”
It’s also entirely possible that he was literally in the process of backing it up. He could have loaded the data onto it, then gone to plug it to his computer to back it up when it suddenly failed. The article doesn’t go into enough detail to draw a conclusion on what he did or didn’t do, but the point is clearly that a drive this new and with few write cycles should not be completely failing.
Still, if SSDs fail repeatedly, something’s not right. That’s the point of the article
So because backups exist, everyone should be okay with buying bad hardware?
I know you’re not actually saying that, but countering “this is a known firmware fault” with a reminder that backups should be done sure makes it look like you’re saying that. There’s still value in making sure consumers’ money goes to products that last.
i think it’s the “we just lost 3TB of data” part… either the headline is hyperbole, in which case screw the clickbaint… or they lost 3TB of data which is always a good time to remind people that cheap NAND flash is cheap NAND flash
Single point of failure… surprised pikachu?
The use case for these drives is always a single point of failure. It’s camera footage out in the field. You have to get it home before you have proper storage.
Do you have a dashcam for your vehicle? Do you have backups before you get the footage home?
NAS w/ RAID…
I purchased a 2TB one of these SanDisk “extreme portable” drives in 2018, and 2 more 2TB drives in 2019. Purchased each one roughly 6 months apart. Knock on wood…so far no problems at all with any of the 3. But, drives do often fail (I’ve had several fail over the years). One general rule of thumb I have when shopping for drives is I never buy the model with the highest storage capacity for the product line. It’s just a dumb superstition I have, but it seems like the higher capacity ones (like 3TB and above) are the ones that have failed on me in the past.
“I trusted all my important data to a single point of failure and now I’m screwed”.
So, yes, I respect that SanDisk’s drive may have a manufacturing defect and that sucks but they have to share the blame for this. Seriously, drive mirroring is a thing and every single OS supports it out of the box. A proper RAID system is a thing and even better. Adding duplicate storage, be it cloud, another NAS or backing up to tape is even better still. It’s the 21st century, you should know that by now if your literal job is based on storing data.
