this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
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Anyone else have a similar experience with one of these drives?

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[–] Offlein@lemmy.world 445 points 2 years ago (20 children)

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?

[–] saddlebag@lemmy.world 120 points 2 years ago (8 children)

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

[–] klyde@lemmy.world 32 points 2 years ago (2 children)

It's becoming more and more noticeable and it's making me sad.

[–] ffolkes@fanexus.com 27 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] oce@jlai.lu 10 points 2 years ago

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.

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[–] BarrelAgedBoredom@lemmy.world 37 points 2 years ago

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

[–] drdabbles@lemmy.world 33 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

[–] stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 2 years ago

Of course I don't carry 5 external drives with me all the time, that would be ridiculous.

I carry the whole HBA.

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[–] Steeve@lemmy.ca 22 points 2 years ago

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!!*

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 15 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] rambos@lemm.ee 10 points 2 years ago

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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[–] showmustgo@lemmy.world 140 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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

[–] Rootiest@lemmy.world 41 points 2 years ago (2 children)

so that I don't need to fellate myself on public forums

But you still do anyway, because you like the way it feels

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[–] autotldr@lemmings.world 67 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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!

[–] 3laws@lemmy.world 9 points 2 years ago
[–] walnutwalrus@lemmy.world 32 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] motor_spirit@lemmy.world 31 points 2 years ago (3 children)
[–] cooopsspace 15 points 2 years ago

redundancy is key

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[–] CosmicSploogeDrizzle@lemmy.world 29 points 2 years ago (5 children)

Ugh, I literally just fucking bought this drive

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[–] scripthook@lemmy.world 27 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (13 children)

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.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 18 points 2 years ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] Intralexical@lemmy.world 16 points 2 years ago

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.

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[–] Reygle@lemmy.world 22 points 2 years ago (4 children)

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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[–] MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 10 points 2 years ago (9 children)

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.

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[–] LouNeko@lemmy.world 10 points 2 years ago

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.

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