This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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
I don't know why people think that this behavior would ever be restricted to Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.?
There's one common element in all these systems...
Just remove the humans and the problem disappears
I’ve seen enough AI freak outs to know that’s not true.
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.
Downvote those dweebs
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.
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.
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
I hope you're getting off on redundancy and not a backup. Because RAID.is.not.a.backup.
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!
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.
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.
Yes, actually.
I do have multiple redundancy set up , but I've had many a sandisk drive fail, and a few wd my passports too. Now, the WDs were refurbs that I throw media on for the home network, or plugging into my shield, or like that. So I am never surprised when they just don't work one day.
But the sandisk were brand new, and failed within weeks. It made me give up on the brand entirely. I just don't like having to deal with my backups failing at that kind of rate. They are good about replacing them, but damn. I think I did two swaps on the one drive, three on another, and then just demanded a refund from the third. The one I use on my dad's computer was the triple fail, and we finally got one that's stayed working for a while now.
The other died after six months and I just trashed it and gave up.
I've also had horrible experiences with sandisk sd cards. They could be fakes, what with having bought them via amazon though.
Can't trust Amazon with shit nowadays. What's the point of sales if you get fake shit in the first place? I mean, Amazon is sleazy even without the common-binning but for a while they were good with their online shopping.
Also, what data storage solutions do you use now? I'm considering just encrypting my stuff and uploading them to some paid cloud service - atleast then someone else smarter than me is responsible for making sure it's safe and accessible.
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.
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
