https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
Profit making as intended
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Technology
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It infuriating that companies talk about sustainability to boost their branding while designing their products with planned obsolescence.
I was sad to learn, that companies will to whatever makes them money within the confines of how strongly they're being watched.
Companies only care about sustainability, as soon as the customers care about it. However, if the customers only care about superficial sustainability, then that's what they'll get...
Further, you can't repair a pool with a drive marked with a warning label.
"Only drives with a healthy status can be used to repair or expand a storage pool," Synology's spokesperson said. "Users will need to first suppress the warning or disable WDDA to continue."
That sounds pretty terrible. I’ve had great luck with seagate and I think I even have a seagate drive. My Drives are all 6+ years old, except for 2 which are a bit newer and I have some drives I bough second hand super cheap. They may be 2 ish years old as well.
I mean at that point, buying WD is asking to be shit on. Member that CMR/SMR fiasco some years ago? Yeah you shoulda boycotted em at that point
That might backfire on WD. I wonder if people will be posting pics of successive warnings like a trophy. Like sometime posting screenshots of router uptimes.
I long while back (~15 years) there was a bit of a fiasco with Seagate drives. It had to do with firmware bricking some drives if I'm not mistaken. I was affect by this and didn't have redundancy back then. I swore Seagate off from then on.
Recently WD had the SMR situation where they had to come clean about it and now this.
I feel like no mater who you go with, they try to screw you either way. That or maybe just go with Toshiba. Haven't tried those yet. I'm not running a Synology anymore so that messaging won't affect me, but it's still annoying to know that it's part of their business practices.
Ah yes..the ever popular trend of chasing positive financial results, no matter how temporary, at the cost of everything else even if 'everything' includes negative financial results in the long term. Brilliant!
every time i think i might go back to western digital i read something ridiculous like this. I'm so glad crucial, sabrent, et al are about to end the platter drive market in the next decade.
Wonder if WD or Segate are ready to license microsoft's 3d optical storage.
I think the warning itself is not inherently bad, but the “please consider replacing the drive soon” portion is definitely unacceptable. I work in the disc drive industry and 3 years is very little, especially for a NAS drive. I’ve personally seen and used a number of drives with >100k POH.
My WD RED NAS drives came with a 5 year warranty... My last synology NAS has had 5x 3TB drives powered on since 2013 - they have only been powered down to move house 5 times over that period.
Unpopular opinion, but I really see no problem with this? They aren't reducing the capabilities of the drive or anything. Three years is a damn good time to have a plan. Whether it be validating your backups, having a hot spare on standby, or double checking your RAID status.
More importantly, for the average consumer who doesn't maintain off site backups and may not have their NAS configured correctly to prevent data loss, giving people a head's up that they are hitting the warranty limit isn't a bad idea.
It's been a long time since I had a drive fail in just three years, but that's still all I consider a guarantee.
I could be wrong, but my understanding from Backblaze data/articles is that if your HDD made it past 1 year, it's probably going to last at least a decade. Drives tend to fail early if they're going to fail.
A warranty warning is fine, though still more obtrusive than I want personally. I haven't lost a disc at all yet tbh, including well over a decade of pretty hard use one several. I've got local parity and cloud backups for when that inevitably changes though.
Laughs in 2011 WD 500gb.