I found PROOF!

[@inao-cz]

Good summary of the problem, but as a software engineer (not for WD) I can tell you that you've found two translation files. These translation files are mapped to specific constant values that are returned by WDDA, but source code of the WDDA will be secret, possibly developped internally by WD. Meaning, you can delete the translation, but it will most likely just display something as "ACTION.DESCRIPTION.0x0..." something something. Well, depending on the software quality. It might also just crash because of missing translation.

[@olafwagner]

yep, I work in software too, and that was exactly my thought - those are just the localization resources.

[@gagemonster555]

...yes? it's the localization but the end user monitoring softwares (synology, qnap) he's referring to is what handles the error codes coming from and decided by WD. he's suggesting they just ignore/don't handle the specific error from WD's software because that specific error is misleading and unnecessary; not to simply delete the localization lines.

[@DSsVideoChannel]

WD has so little confidence in their products that they think... if you've actually gotten it to work for three years, you had better replace it soon!

[@zvxcvxcz]

For the Reds, yeah... everyone has known the Reds were trash since inception. Why do you think they did SMR on the Reds first? To see if the trash drive buyers would accept it first. The Blacks and Golds are great. Stay away from Reds, Purples, Greens and Blues. This is a warning for those that made the mistake of buying WD reds, not a bid for more money. I think the difference between "might consider" and the NAS maker saying "please consider" is huge as well (the later is an imperative, so it is much stronger language). It's like the difference between your mechanic shrugging and saying, "meh, you can replace it if you feel like it to make the light turn off" vs. looking at you pleadingly saying, "please consider replacing it for the safety of yourself and others on the road."

[@sooo0kie]

Thank you from Japan.

[@repatch43]

WD has been pulling sneaky sh** for quite a while now. They will continue to push things until it affects their sales. Let's hope this will do that.

[@ejolite]

Yeah. As for me I've been afraid to buy anything else that WD. And now I'm even afraid to buy WD. Luckily I don't need any new drivers for a while...

[@GarettHarnish]

WD Pro warranties are 5 years so wouldn't a prefail warning at 3 years suggesting a replacement from WD's own test justify a warranty drive replacement from WD?

[@williamhicks2763]

@@GarettHarnishIt’s not clear if this also effects Red Pro but if it does a lot of people that bought WD drives from Amazon will find out their warranties are not covered through WD. I see comments about that every time I look at drives on Amazon. I only buy them directly from WD or in person, in the retail packaging, from MicroCenter. What a mess. I hope it doesn’t effect WD Pros in any way. I was going to go Toshiba for three drives this week because of the Synology compatibility list, for the Toshibas having higher storage capacity, so I hope they are good.

[@LNOHMS]

Impressive work Will... antidotal story here; I spoke with an exec from WD regarding a removable drive failure. I was upset that it was going to cost me 2k for recovery of my data. He explained that they have

[@jfkastner]

BIG Scandal lurking in the 'fine print' of WDDA: (from the WD Support page) " ... What data do we collect? Usage data may include items such as device configuration, CPU and other usage statistics by application, API calls, service crash information, network status, storage utilization, search terms and size and type of files ... " - API calls = Every App you run gets reported back - search Terms = REALLY? WHY? - size & type of file = FINGERPRINTING is possible

[@benexe1123]

It's interesting that some WD Red Pro drives have this enabled even though those have 5 year warranties.

[@chrismurphy2769]

This makes it seem like a pro for WD. Maybe they'll just give you a new drive since you bought the premium reds?

[@Yajtsa]

I appreciate the effort to get to the bottom of this. I gave up on WD long ago after having several external drives crash hard enough to lose all of my data.

[@markjones2349]

In case you didn't know, 100% of hard drives will eventually fail. It's unavoidable.

[@AK-ny5bz]

In my experience Seagate gave been even less reliable

[@williamhicks2763]

I guess we all have a sample of one but I’ve never lost data on a volume because of a WD red or Red Pro crashing and I’ve probably had 15 or so over the years.

[@change_your_oil_regularly4287]

I've had the exact opposite issue. I've had many more SG drives fail versus WD

[@fmax3000]

Great efforts. I’m an avid fan for a long time. Keep up the good work man and keep exposing them. I only use WD on all my servers, but this horrible practice will make me think twice next time I’m in the market for more storage. Shame on you WD.

[@SpaceRexWill]

Thanks man! This was by far the most research I have put into a video!

[@Evertb1]

I am in luck. I always have been a WD Red guy. When I started with my FreeNAS box those were the most recommended on the FreeNAS forum. But just when I was about to replace the WD Red drives in my then FreeNAS now TrueNAS server, the scandal with the WD Red SMR drives was going on. My TrueNAS server is now running Iron Wolf drives. Just as the two Synology boxes I have for use in the home. But deep down inside I fear that sooner or later Seagate will have a nasty surprise for us as well. Profit is the bottom line for those companies.

[@MagnusOlssonMalvik]

@@Evertb1 I have both WD red pro and Ironwolf pro and for my very small sample size the ironwolfs are getting reallocated sectors long before any WD red have had any, so bad that the ironwolf was replaced only a few years and the WD Red have been running for 4 times as long and none of them had any problems. So like you said they both have their problems :)

[@Evertb1]

@@MagnusOlssonMalvik The problem with the WD Reds was that WD without any warning started to use SMR drives in the Red series. Rendering them almost useless under certain circumstances. I have used WD drives (not only Reds) for a lot of years without much problems but some things just can't be tolerated. I could not accept the sneaky way WD was doing this. Though to date I have no quality problems at all with my IronWolfs and no reported errors yet. But I am sure it can happen that one or more of them develop problems. Hopefully not before the planned 5 years use.

[@jamesmonschke747]

Speculation; If this list is applied selectively based on drive models, then I would presume that the list represents those drive models that Western Digital knows are more likely to fail prematurely, and they want users to pull the drives before they actually fail to; 1) avoid warranty repairs, and/or 2) reduce future PR / reputation issues regarding large numbers of failures being documented.

[@hrq007]

- this is informative and unfortunate. I hate that WD keeps shooting themselves in the foot. Their drives used to be great, and in my experience (both at the datacenter and at home), much more reliable than the competition.

[@donaldhoudek2889]

I have 4 WD drives, one just crapped out 2 months ago and has been running for at least 3 years. Time for a change going forward

[@7alfatech860]

Nice deep dive, thanks. You truly are a Rex of NAS. This is really the critical type of reporting that we need.

[@SpaceRexWill]

Thanks man!

[@cesiumion]

​@@SpaceRexWill Good job bro

[@terrymusenliu5343]

Agree

[@Snoekverslaafde]

Fixed in 7.2-64570 Update 2. "Adjusted the suggestions generated by Western Digital Device Analytics (WDDA)."

[@SpaceRexWill]

Awesome! Just saw that!

[@Maverick7r]

I've always stuck with WD drives for YEARS but because of this issue, (and the SMR issue) I went with Seagate IronWolf drives for my new Synology NAS so I'm glad to see what you've found here. Great video and thanks for the info!!

[@yayinternets]

I recently had 4 drives on my NAS “fail” within a few weeks of each other recently, which were all WD Reds. I had the sneaking suspicion that WD was doing something shady like this as it didn’t make sense that they would fail like that. I replaced with Seagate drives where I could just because I knew it was BS and likely related to their bios. Was trying to find information about it previously which is why I think I got this recommendation. Thanks for going deep and getting to the bottom of this!

[@mdd1963]

DIi they actually fail, as in drop off -line/stop working, or just give the stupid warnings over excessive power on hours/3 years usage?

[@JaysonNarold]

They know how to make drives last ! they are dogging us

[@wfp9378]

I use Toshiba. I believe these are what Synology rebrands as there own. Have been moving from Seagate and WD to these and am very happy

[@Evertb1]

Great work. It's a pity that most users of NAS devices will never see this. This should be widely known. Not only to shake up the people at WD but also as a warning to other brands that consumers are not stupid.

[@astacc]

I think people that at least remotely follow this space were shaken up a bit by that SMR/CMR issue few years back (personaly got burned on 6TB "NAS" drive).. so I'll most likely avoid WD for foreseeable future or until seagate have some big issue that makes me reconsider my stance edit - accidentality wrote synology instead of seagate

[@rnyzen2.079]

@@astacc so whats the recommended drive for synology? Need help

[@Mainyehc]

I suspect this issue will become known… Expect this to blow up in, say, LTT (they use A LOT of hard drives, and Linus Sebastian is known for also going nuclear on anti-consumer practices, e-waste, etc.) and become really ugly for WD…

[@Evertb1]

@@rnyzen2.079 Up to date I have seen no negative comments for Seagate Iron Wolf drives. I run 14 of them myself (8 x 4 TB in TrueNAS server, 4 x 4 TB in DS918+ and 2 x 8 TB in Synology DS220+)

[@VforValenti]

What about the WD Ultrastar drives??? I really appreciate the all time hero HGST line.

[@kmonyt]

Whether or not a test tells me so, my own personal rule that has served me well over 30 years is that once a drive is out of warranty, I pull it from being a drive I count on. I buy 5 year enterprise drives only (Golds, and HGST HCxxx, Exos) for home usage. I also pull drives upon the very first smart error. I manage a couple hundred TB at home, and this has never let me down. While you're right about the life of the drive being underestimated, I'd rather be safe than sorry. Even with redundancy in place, I just don't want the headache, and pull it on my terms.

[@user-wl7dt1uw2e]

Well you have a lot of money and probably represent 1% of the people out there. So you are that 1% elite. Congrats. Do you change the tires on your car every year too? Thankfully you aren't an influencer. You can't be an influencer when you have views that are shared by 1% of the population.

[@ikjadoon]

The decision is even simpler for me: I won't trust a manufacturer that sells 5-year warranties and throws drive warning errors at just 3 years of usage, 100% of the time on 100% of drives. WD ideally should re-brand these drives at 3-years, if their internal telemetry shows so many errors at years 4 & 5.

[@michaelnoble4702]

Thanks for the info. On my DS1821+, DS1621+, and DS1520+ (all DSM 7.2-64561) WDDA was enabled in the synoinfo.conf file (support_wdda="yes"). However, none of my WD drives had the WDDA option showing in Storage Manager - HDD/SSD - Health Info (multiple 8TB WD80EFZZ-68BTXN0 and 14TB WD140EFGX-68B0GN0). As a precaution I have set support_wdda="no" (via SSH instruction) on all three of my NAS units. Edit: After update to DSM7.2 64570 WDDA resets to "yes" / Update to DSM 7.2 64570 update 1 either retains the "no" setting or defaults to "no" (already had WDDA set to "no" when I updated to 64570 update 1)

[@MichaelPottsIT]

I have a BUNCH of 4 TB WD Re drives (WD4000FYYZ) and I did a quick spot check. I have at least one drive with 71183 Power_On_Hours (97 months or 8.1 years) and several others with 5+ years (61443 hrs [7 yrs], 51289 hrs [5.8 yrs], 46148 hrs [5.2 yrs], 42550 hrs [4.8 yrs]). And the majority of the drives that fail on me fail with ~1 year of spinning time. Quite agree: age doesn't predict failure (except where a younger drive is more likely fail).

[@wmcomprev]

While I'll agree that the root problem is WD saying this is an error for the drive, Synology should be able to program the DSM to not react to it as an error, but only as an informational parameter, which is how WD should have treated this parameter. "User may consider..." is NOT a message that should trigger an error. The wording of this sounds informational only. Synology should not be doing anything with this other than passing on the information to the user. The wording does NOT indicate an error state with the drive. The wording should simply be changed to indicate the number of hours the drive has been in use, with no further comment.

[@Tugela60]

They don't say it is an error, it is a warning that the drive is approaching the end of its spec lifetime. It is for information purposes to aid you in the management of your drive portfolio.

[@wmcomprev]

@@Tugela60 Agreed. But it appeared that Synology was overreacting to that informational message and treating it as an error. Also, if the software to read that message is turned on, it's probably going to become a nag message. Nag messages induce the "cry wolf" syndrome and people start ignoring significant messages. I have hard drives that are 20 years old and doing fine, a nag at 3 years is ridiculous.

[@W9HJBill]

Interesting, after seeing this, I went in to my system and there is no longer a WDDA tab under the drive "Health Info" section. It now just says Overview, SMART, and History. None of my 4 18TB WDC WD181KFGX drives in my DS920+ running DSM 7.2-64570.

[@coctailrob]

I found some software somewhere I forget right now what it was called. It was designed for data recovery/ drive repair. The demo version has the ability to clear SMART data which includes power on hours count. I wonder if this would reset the WDDA warning. The software was specifically for certain WDD drives

[@williamlau7179]

Speaking of using 2x4tb wd red (cmr) for about 42500 hours in wd ex2 nas, both are still functioning as of 2023.09.23, but 1 started to show sign of weakness so I put it in pc for casual use. Two weeks ago, I put in a new toshiba n300 8tb with the other wd red 4tb and set as JBOD, working OK with n300 at 36C and 2 degrees cooler and more silent than red. Bottom line: WD red is an ordinary hdd and WD as an international company should act more reputably and reliably to its customers.

[@eduvandeursen1848]

WD should take the lead to prove this is wrong, not Synology. WD has a business interest to be one of the HDD suppliers for Synology not the way around. Very poor management of the WD company. Good work Spacerex! You are not to blaim what so ever. Keep on the good work. Bery much appriciated also in The Netherlands 💪

[@EJSmith-dk3yg]

I love many of the European countries, like yours, that have a much better, unbiased and measured view, than seems to be prevalent in the U.S. !

[@soniclab-cnc]

I have about 60 WD red disks and have had no issues in TrueNAS.... some of the older disks are much much older than three years and have been transplanted from several server iterations. All are conventional media and non shingled drives. I have complete trust in my ZFS pools with several layers of backup.

[@mrhevia]

I've been watching your videos for a while. Now you gained a new subscriber.

[@SpaceRexWill]

Awesome, thank you!

[@fredashay]

What do you recommend instead of WD Red Pro? Seagate Ironwolf Pro? Something else?

[@anthonylipke7754]

The warning sound pretty mild and I think it would depend on your maintenance plan or policy. Scheduled replacement of working parts before failure is an accepted practice depending. I personally would run it till it dies. This sound like catastrophizing. How many operating hours would you recommend they decide on before they launch the product? What lifetime should the support and how much is it worth to you?

[@macmund]

Where is the control to disable it?

[@first_gen_collector]

I think the concept of power on hours exceeding warranty etc is absolutely reasonable but to your point, it can/should be worded differently.

[@marcfruchtman9473]

Could you explain how "running" this test is actually creating a problem that can cause early drive failure as opposed to simply reporting a problem that can ignored?

[@mlsmithjr]

This isn't as big a deal as the outrage crowd makes it out to be. These are simply helpful messages to people who otherwise pay no attention to smart results. I'm still a WD man, especially since I tried a bunch of Ironwolfs and they run too hot. I have 22 8tb+ drives spinning across 3 servers and I have never in the 6 years of running servers had to replace a WD Red. But I have replaced 3 Ironwolfs in the past year. This warning message is nothing I can't ignore. Save your outrage for Synology's self-branded drive enforcement.

[@bposegate1]

recently updated a QNAP NAS and started receiving a warning that the WD SSDs have over 20,000 hours and should be replaced soon. SMART estimates they still have 97% life left.

[@qcnck2776]

I wonder if the NAS has WD drives, and is doing exactly what this video is about. This would lend more support to the idea that this is a problem of WD drives rather than Synology.

[@bposegate1]

@@qcnck2776 Yes, it's a 4 bay NAS and it only gives me the warning on the 2 WD SSDs I have installed.

[@giorgiogroves]

I have a 12 year old Segate drive running in my DS412+ with 107,933 on time hours and running strong. It's interisting to know that after 100,000 hours of on time hours the counter rolls over to 0 hours.

[@Rorschach1024]

Ok, so the warranty is a 5 year warranty. Clearly they believe that the drives cannot last 5 years so they are throwing out a code saying g the drive is failing after only 3. So they are saying you get a new drive after 3 years, right?

[@PhotonCompute]

This WDDA test setting and alarm state is more applicable to Enterprise environments and Managed Support Services contractors where they will have a budget for planned replacement of drives to minimise downtime. It is probably overkill for SMBs, SoHo and in-house maintenance Use Cases.

[@NicosLeben]

So essentially if I don't use that weird tool because I do it my own way, there is no problem with WD Red NAS drives? The whole point of this video is premature warning based on power-on hours or powercycles?

[@v0ldy54]

Do you think this is also happening with WD's own NAS (or something shady like that)? I unfortunately got a Mycloud EX2 Ultra before I kenw anything about NAS, and recently it started having weir issues where the red LED indicating HDD problems is on and it says something's off with the SMART from the disk, however if I read the entries they all look fine and if I reboot the unit the problem disappears. Super weird, and considering my NAS is off most of the time (I just use WOL when I need it) it SURELY has not even collected a full year worth of power on time.

[@joesweeney6262]

Thanks for this. I am about to purchase an additional Synology bay and was about to put in WD drives. Based on this, I'll switch to Seagate.

[@tglenn3121]

So, you're basically saying to not 'accept' or 'agree to' the Data Analytics feature when setting up these drives? Is that correct?

[@xelac1334]

More people need to see this. Commenting to try to boost this in the algorithm. Share this with your friends and family!

[@spaaske]

So I just bought two WD Red Plus 8TB disks. Are these a bad purchase, or should I just ignore whatever WDDA says? As a second question, what _should_ I be keeping an eye on for drive health?

[@andresilvasophisma]

That file is just a template they send to every manufacturer so that they can translate the messages to multiple languages. Every manufacturer can customize the messages to their taste, I don't think you have a case here. Where you have a case is on calling them out on trying to control when users replace their drives. I'm still using a 16 year old, non NAS, WD hard drive (currently 79322 power on hours, so realistically 9 years of actual use), and replacing a NAS drive after three years sounds a bit comical to me. Another important thing is, be carefull when you say that all you need is to delete the power on test. If you delete the line that mentions it you're just deleting the localized message. I'm willing to bet that the drive still gets marked with the warning, it just doesn't show (because there's no message to show). You can always do this test, try deleting the message and get the details of an already marked drive, I'm guessing that the message that previously said to replace the drive won't show up.

[@dennisvanlith]

So I've checked my system with two 10 Gb WD red drives, that are about to pass the three mark. But couldn't find the option to turn it off in the drive pool settings stated in your previous video about this issue. So I've turned it off by SSH found in the Reddit boards... Quick two questions; Is there any SSH command to check if it's on or off by default? And does anyone know if Synology removed the WDDA tool in their UI in the latest update, I could not find the 'disable' feature of that WDDA tool... For the next upgrade of my drives I'll not be going back to WD any longer, they lost me as their client after also selling me those cheap drives in my previous NAS build... I hate it when marketing and sales push the buttons on a productline if they do not take into consideration the ethical aspect. Something that is holy to me and my profession.

[@katycatjulius]

My hard drive needs to be replaced when windows disk manager says it needs to be initialised but fails to do that when you tell it to do so

[@ds99]

Thank you for your research. I noticed you mentioned Seagate drives in your other video. Instead of WD do you recommend Seagate? Thanks.

[@heli.thatSTEVE]

ok, what drives should one use in our NASs?

[@benexe1123]

I have WD Red Pro 16tb drives and a Synology Nas, I don't even see WDDA test in storage manager as an option, so it's definitely not enabled on mine by default, running DSM 7.2

[@gianluca.biondi]

great video! So do you recommend if this anomaly occurs, to take the Seagate?

[@robinmoret]

Thanks for investigating deeper on the topic !

[@carlos_mann]

Just go ahead and hit the subscribe button! If anyone stumbles upon this comment and isnt already go ahead and just do it now, you thank yourselves later. Absolutely appreciate all the hard work and helpful info 👍

[@SpaceRexWill]

Glad you liked it!

[@NYJETS1986]

Is this a Synology-specific issue? I have WD drives in an Asustor and dont see info related to that NAS

[@Kiwi0Six]

To be fair, there is a WIDE gulf between "might consider replacing" and "should replace". IMO, the "might consider" should be handled as INFO, not WARN. That is on Synology's handling of the signal. Information is there to allow the user to apply his risk level. If my fuel gauge indicates half full, I will consider filling up. If my wife's fuel tank indicates half full, I should fill it up. Not that I'm a fan of WD for their other transgressions and their lack of transparency, but I think this particular issue is way overblown against WD.

[@michamarkowski2204]

Exactly. I wonder if QNAP will also consider this flag as a warning.

[@itsmecurtis]

This.

[@PeterBrockie]

It says they recommend replacing the drives. No problem. I'll replace them with another company's drives.

[@Budley]

What I can't understand is Western Digital's motivation for doing this. Yes, the obvious answer is to sell more HDDs. I get that. Where my confusion lies is with the idea that, as a company that manufactures HDDs, why in the world would you openly brand your own as being unreliable beyond a 3 year life span? Whether nefarious or just plain dumb, Western Digital is indirectly labelling their own HDDs as inadequate and substandard. Even if they weren't being called out on it, it seems to me that it would still be in their best interest to squash this asap. Thanks for researching this, Will. Your conclusions are compelling and much appreciated.

[@qcnck2776]

Good point. I would hesitate to buy a drive that warned me to replace it as soon as the warranty was over. I bet the WD engineers are like WTF, our drives don't all fail at 3 years!

[@ks220]

Hey i‘m a complete beginner and don‘t understand most of this stuff. i recently bought a used Synology DS218j with 2x4tb WD Red Drives for 60$ Do i have to do something to prevent this stuff?

[@ABSEUDUS]

So I just watched the first video a couple of hours ago and as someone who burned through a lot of HDDs over the last couple of years, I just doublechecked on all I still had flying around and also some invoices and most of them that broke down were WD Red and one WD Green. The Blacks were fine but I guess they don't sell them anymore? I use a lot of HDDs to store data for video cutting/editing for myself and also as a freelance cutter (I started recently to offer my services) and even on a non 24/7 usage, most of my WD HDDs died after about 3 years, while I still have other HDDs that are older, but still fine...

[@robertheinrich2994]

how much warranty are they giving? some sellers could give extended warranty beyond 3 years, are they f----d?

[@TLC94LS]

Well after watching this, my NAS went degraded and showed drive 1 and 2 failed. I ordered two new iron wolf 6tb, to replace, Synology NAS isn't "reading" them, not showing up on storage manager. Maybe its a NAS issue. Anyone got any tips??

[@UNgineering]

is it just predatory tactics or are they marketing cheaper drives as "nas-rated" so they will start failing after 3+ years of use?

[@foundlost5583]

Nice work Sherlock! Thank goodness I have Seagate drives.

[@jpfourie2020]

So glad I'm follow you. Thanks for doing all the research.

[@Patrick-mq9jc]

Great research and action taken! Thanks for going to bat on this!

[@WesBelisle]

Is this still an issue? Did WD ever back off on this?

[@KunouJS]

I don't own a Synology, but do own an Asustor. I hope they learn from this and don't add this awful software from WD, since I have 4 Reds in it! Thanks for the PSA!

[@babthooka]

I've never used synology or the other ones, but I don't think editing the file and deleting error code #2 will necessarily help in the long run. Do these NAS solutions (synology & co) not do upgrades on their software? One such upgrade could easily restore the check/error.

[@xybersurfer]

i'm guessing that they don't offer a replacement if this happens during the warranty period

[@accesser]

Great research, How long do do think mechanical HDD manufacturers have left before SSD price and capacity takes over in the prosumer space ?

[@LtdJorge]

Still a lot, since higher than 12TB, SSDs are multiple orders of magnitude more expensive than HDDs.

[@accesser]

@@LtdJorge yeah enterprise the price is okay but not great for us consumers Hopefully we do get 16+ TB drives even if it's not the absolute fastest chips. It would still be better than spinning discs

[@supertekkel1]

Excellent work. Question though; how long are WD Red drives supposed to last. I have some running 56000hours (6 years) with no fault codes.

[@SpaceRexWill]

If you don’t have any smart errors then drives can go 9 years, though likely you will have at least one failure of a group of drives by then

[@grzegorzkolbrecki8344]

WD: Take this shotgun and shoot my knee, Synology: As You wish :D

[@mr.g.fisher]

Fantastic video! As others have said, thanks for all the work that has gone into uncovering this.

[@SpaceRexWill]

Glad you enjoyed it!

[@DaiShuryoTechnus]

How are the Seagate IronWolves?

[@darylnd]

It seems WD can't stop stepping on a rake. I'm replacing some ancient drives (WD Red HDD data and parity drives, SK Hynix SSD cache pool) that have failed or are failing in my Unraid server. I'm also adding a second SSD to my ThinkPad. Even though this issue doesn't affect me, (and I didn't get any of the SMR Reds) I'm taking WD off my personal vendor list. You can't rely on a product if you can't rely on the company that makes it.

[@rayjennings3637]

How do we disable it and please don't come at me with a ton of acronyms. My 4TB NAS is coming up to 2½ years old so now I'm worried.

[@luisgpr1]

I already did not buy WD NAS drives because I don't know if they're bait-and-switching me (SMR) but this seals the deal forever, at least for me. I have a few WD Gold drives running inside my NAS, does anyone know if these have the surprise code on those? Actually the NAS doesn't show me nothing about WDDA.

[@SuspiciousAra]

or people can just disable disk testing schedule?

[@ChrisThe1]

Hi, I've been using WD's Red and Red Pro in their MyBook Duo direct attach raid. Although I personally haven't had any issue with those drives for the last 8ish years my sample size is obviously very small (4 drives, 2 each). Now if I wanted to go with a different company, is there one offering a similar type of product? Most direct attach raids are quite a bit more expensive, and I'm not interested in a nas.

[@Lachesisms]

WD makes incredible drives but why anyone would use a Red/Red Pro in a Synology is beyond me. You should only EVER use the UltraStar. These are cheaper, stronger, faster, and actually designed for NAS and farms and network servers. I stopped using Seagate and Toshiba years ago in favor of UltraStars, you all should too. Sure would be nice if Synology would just make a 100% NVMe NAS, that would fix this.

[@johnm2012]

It's just a lookup table for converting from an arcane status code returned by the test software to plain English (or any other language, as appropriate).

[@michaelrjohnson11]

Are you able to list out some valid options instead? I have a WD Red and was going to get another but saw your last post on the topic and stopped. But don't know who to trust right now.

[@coolcat23]

Just disable the warning. NASCompares posted a message by Synology for how to do it. For some reason SpaceRex, either does not know how to do it in a user-friendly manner or does not want to help users. NASCompares forwarded a message by Synology in which they explain how to disable the warning through the DSM interface. No "sudo" required. Very bizarre that an expert like SpaceRex would not just point that out but instead create two long videos about alleged anti-consumer behaviour when Synology is known for much worse anti-consumer behaviour.

[@bailey125]

@@coolcat23 3:58 You obviously didn't watch the video

[@coolcat23]

@@bailey125 I did watch the video, thank you. First, according to Synology there is a much easier way, which does not require the use of "sudo". Second, both videos could be replaced by one simple tip which is to disable the warning (as per Synology's user-friendlly instructions). If SpaceRex applied the same standard to Synology that he applies to WD, he would have to stop supporting/recommending Synology because of their anti-consumer treatment of third-party equipment. Synology makes it much more difficult than necessary to use third-party RAM, third-party hard drives, and third-party network adapters. All to maximise their own profit since there is no benefit to the user when buying the propriety Synology equipment. Remember that Synology used to be much more liberal about third-party equipment. I'm not saying Synology should be avoided because of their anti-consumer tactics, but SpaceRex is saying WD should be avoided because of one warning (that can be ignored in any reasonable OS without using "sudo"), so I'm saying if SpaceRex is that sensitive, he should not be recommending Synology with a good conscience.

[@samer229]

I have a 1821+ filled with wd red (legacy from a while back), some of them over 60K hours. I can't afford to replace all 8 drives at once. Would you suggest that I start with say 2 ironwolf and slowly but surely build that out? but then I have mixed drives which is not recommended...what do you recommend?

[@SpaceRexWill]

So I would not worry about replacing them! Just make sure to not enable the WDDA test

[@samer229]

@@SpaceRexWill amazing. Thank you! But I was planning on expanding the storage anyways...so stick with wd?

[@SpaceRexWill]

I generally would keep with the same drives if you already have them. Less weird stuff to happen as long as you disable (or don't enable) WDDA

[@michaelk946]

So where exactly do I disable this. What is the command on the synology dsM.

[@Tugela60]

You need to junk your Synology unit. No other way to be safe.

[@aliaghil1]

As always great video. That happend to me a while ago, I would say shame on WD, and I will not buy WD anymore.

[@donciak]

how you suppress the wanring? you all said that was not possible and once wdda was enabled and disk flagged: is done

[@SpaceRexWill]

I have not been able to test it as I dont have any drives with it, but from reading the code it looks like you CAN suppress these. I would disable WDDA and I bet that would disable it

[@Ruytter]

Can someone say if this affects truenas, or is it just sinology and qnap?

[@myria2834]

As a rule, I phase out hard drives and SSDs every 3-5 years. Even if it is perfectly functional, I will either get rid of it or relegate it to service as a low priority games drive, so I couldn't care less if it fails. Saying that, having a diagnostic software become functionally useless on a device after 3 years is moronic. Those files are just translatiom files to make readable text for error codes in all languages though, not a directive from Western Digital that anyone would have read.

[@mrfafaa96]

This is such a shame... I've been interested to build a nas for a while now and I first looked into getting a Synology nas with WD drives since both those brands seemed to be popular and sounded good at first. Then I heard about the way Synology is trying to force users into only getting their drives which was a big no no from me, then this shady stuff with WD trying to trick users into buying new drives while their "old" drives are perfectly fine. So I think I'll drop both of them and instead look into getting a Qnap nas with Seagate drives instead. I haven't completely made up my mind yet but what I'm thinking of is the following: - Qnap TS-873A-8G 8-Bay Tower - 8 Seagate IronWolf Pro 16TB 7200rpm 256MB

[@Evertb1]

For home use I have a Synology DS918+ (main) and a DS 220+ (back-up). Both equipped with Iron Wolf hard drives (4 TB and 8 TB). I did not see any problem at all. Working without issues for almost 3 years now. There has been several tests on Google with non Synology disks on the newer Synology models (NasCompares for example) and as far as I know, no issues have been found. Though I admit that Synology put the pressure on the consumers to go for their own branded disks. Hardware wise you have a good brand with QNap (superior to Synology) but when it comes to the OS, Synology is superior. In my opinion that are more important factors then the brand of your disks.

[@MrTwixraider]

Luckily my Western Digital Red Plus drives don't come with the analytics function. It would be insane if I would have to renew my drives every three years. I would throw my Nas out of the window, because then I can go and use a cloud service.

[@coolcat23]

No one, using a proper OS, has to renew WD drives, even those that issue the "power on time" information, every three years. No one. If you want to blame anyone for making the "power on time" matter an issue, blame Synology for treating this information like actually relevant warnings.

[@bonzaihb3432]

Hi fellow Syno owners! I am also using WD Red (pro) drives in both of my NASes (DS720+ and DS213+), and found out a very strange error mode on my dated DS213+ (used as backup for the backup, down in the basement): the first drive (right one, close to the mobo) is always running ~2°C higher as the second one, and after a while, maybe 2yrs or so, it starts throwing I/O errors and bad sectors, while the second drive of the same batch does none of that. I've had this with two generations of WD drives now, anyone has a clue?

[@Tugela60]

Failing drive?

[@tdome3000]

All those ASCII files and the web page text don't have anything to do with the behavior of the NAS, i.e. if it should flag the drive or not. All they do is offer human readable explanations to the codes, and _nothing_ else.

[@FreedomToRoam86]

Maybe fixed by Sinology? I could not find anything but the AutoSMART drive tests in Storage settings today. No WD tests that I could find. I looked since I too have WD Red drives. Buit won’t next time!

[@thethirdman225]

Has WD responded to this video?

[@darrellpatenaude3825]

Thank you for your effort figuring this out.

[@garynagle3093]

Great! Thanks for the research and result sharing.

[@stephenrott]

Thank you for sharing your expertise.

[@MegaSegawa]

Seems like it's still Synology who chose arbitrarily the 3 years threshold.

[@JaysonNarold]

Some of these hard drives will whine and grind and sound terrible and they must have been running for 20 years. One time I was sent a drive that was notorious for blowing power supplies - it was for a hp RIP and it blew out 2 computer power supplies and it would have blown the power supply in my RIP for sure. Parts are designed sometimes to blow out other parts.