"I put 3TB of irreplaceable data on a single drive, and want to blame anyone but myself for my data loss"
Go away with this garbage.
I personally have a NAS with 12TB striped over 3 drives, I sure wouldn't blame WD if one drive failed and I lost everything.
E: this whole comment section is why tech illiterate people shouldn't really comment on hardware failures like this. The only fact that is know is that the verge faced 2 drive failures and lost 3TB of data due to a lack of safe data storage practices. If they were tech literate they wouldn't have lost any data.
The verge did not confirm the mode of failure, and therefore the second failure could've been completely unrelated to the firmware issue. Nobody knows anything, other than the verge needs to educate themselves on how to properly store irreplaceable data.
The claim here seems to be that the product has an unusual failure rate, the manufacturer has acknowledged the original problem and released a fix, and it does not appear to be fixed. I don't read it as a sob story about some reporter's lost data.
Given the verges track record on tech reporting, i wouldn't put faith in their journalistic integrity of a hit piece unless they show a bit more than "look, i lost a drive after they said they fixed the issue. They're lying!"
They have a history of tech misreporting. It's not new news.
When you get a bunch of tech illiterate people to write tech articles, you get a bunch of garbage reporting. Including this. They haven't back up their claims. No actual analysis of the failure point of the drives. They don't show any proof that their 2 drive failures are even related other than they're the same drive model. And even then, they didn't include the exact sku
They have a history of tech misreporting. It's not new news.
This does not add anything to the discussion. They had that infamous PC build video (for which they apologized and which they retracted) but that's the only thing I can remember in the years I've been following them.
Also, providing a detailed technical analysis was not the scope of the article. Maybe you don't follow them very much, but they usually don't do this kind of things. They mostly cover internet culture, how technology impacts society, etc., because that's their scope. This does not mean the editors are tech illiterate. The point of the article was to say that WD drives fail a lot; some publications are reporting that while some others don't say anything; and the company is ignoring the problem.
I agree that the tone of the article is pretty butt-hurt and whiny, but that's a problem of style and not of substance
Ooh ooooh look at me everybody I'm so much smarter than this IDIOT that expected the devices he PAID FOR to work as advertised and the company to be honest and straightforward with firmware issues and updates
I run this better system than NORMIES and even if it fails (because I'm an idiot) I DONT CARE ABOUT THE DATA on them because iT DiDn'T mATteR tO Me iN tHe fIrSt PlAcE.
PS For people wondering about the second paragraph, check this guy's other comments in this thread.
Correct. My next build will be redundant but given that my truenas pool is only storing movies, shows, music and porn, I don't much care if I lose the contents due to a drive failure
These drives have a very different use case than a rack mount NAS. They're portable ruggedized devices for field use, like dumping content from your camera so you can keep shooting. Two would be better but it sounds like a known flaw that is causing random, frequent losses.