In my experience, their overall quality control has plummeted over the last few years. I’ve bought 3 Red drives for my home Synology. After about a year with each, the drive utilization graph will start creeping up toward a steady 100% while the other drives in the RAID are mostly idle. All drives have the same throughput. All drives have the same IOPS. And yet, the Red starts taking longer and longer to complete its requests. There aren’t any SMART errors or warnings. If I pull the drive and run WD’s diagnostics, it’s fine. It shows every sign of being perfectly healthy, other than being dog slow up until the day I replace it. I’m 3-for-3 with this happening. Maybe I’m the only person and they work great for everyone else. I won’t buy another, though.
I think we’re seeing WD turn into HP. People will still buy it for the name on the label, but those in the know will steer their friends to calmer waters.
To add another anectode, I’ve been running a 12TB and a 6TB WD Red Pro (both CMR) in my Synology without issues (knock on wood) for 16 and 38 months respectively. I recently added an 18TB Seagate Exos and a 16TB WD Ultrastar, which are also both CMR and are intended for data centers (with twice the MTBF of Ironwolf or Red Pro). The enterprise drives are quite a bit louder, but since the NAS isn’t within earshot it’s not a problem.
The NAS runs 24/7 as a Home Assistant and Plex server, as well as handling backups from machines on my LAN. So far, so good, but I’m not kidding myself about eventual drive failure. I know it’ll happen at some point.
WDDA analytics are not turned on. Don’t need to see a pointless warning at the 3-year mark.
Basically the same segmentation of “good business” and “bad business” there too.
There’s still a place for buggy whip makers. The remaining ones can charge an arm and a leg because the few remaining ones generally compete on quality. I bet that’s what we’ll see for HDDs soon.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/sandisk-extreme-ssds...
Western Digital's isn't any better though, due to their own mismanagement
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05/western-digital-gets...
I think that they realized that there is not so much in common between the HDD and flash business. No added value to own the 2 business compared to separated entities.
With that, the WD legacy HDD business can continue as a dividend stock dying slowly. And the flash business can now pretend to crazy valuations based on a shinny future.
The stand-alone HDD business will end up as an acquisition in the not-distant future (Toshiba, Seagate, etc. somebody will eat it).
Like
> Western Digital spins Disk+Disc Businesses off
Edit: I'm sure the editorial staff at The Register are brainstorming a headline at this very moment.
They're "disc"-ussing it.
What is important is how they handle that. I had a faulty Sandisk and it was replaced with a working one without any problem or unnecessary question. Some other brands annoy you with stupid questions, puzzles and other tricks trying to avoid doing a replacement. And some just ignore any requests (ex. Samsung, from my experience) to replace a faulty SSD.
I understand that you probably are alluding to the fact that you never scientifically measured this experiment and that this is anecdotal. But this is pretty loose verbiage when we're talking about a product that is guaranteed to fail at some point or another. These are a wear item.
My 2 Crucial MX500 SSDs have been pretty solid too; nothing bad to report on them.
Re: your SSD, did you RMA it?
