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?

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!

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.

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.

“There are two kinds of people: those of have lost data and those who are about to lose data.”

Redundancy saves a lot of headaches.

I’m always for supporting new technologies, new companies, new ideas, but that does not mean I’m dropping everything to just get that brand new shiny stuff.

I see the concept and technology for SSDs as groubdbreaking and pretty awsome but I don’t trust those drives to store data I don’t want to lose. I still use good old fashioned HDDs: the tech is tried and tested, mature and reliable and very affordable.

I still use SSDs but I use them as not safe storage mediums, prone to break at any moment, without any warning.

And regardless of this I still keep several copies of important files and critical ones, if possible, are made physical.

And even then…

Read the opening sentence again.

Bruh what?

If the data doesn’t matter: Put it on one drive.

If losing the data would cost you minor downtime: Put it on two drives (or storage arrays of some sort) in two locations.

If losing the data would cause major downtime: Put it on three drives (or storage arrays of some sort) in two or three locations.

If losing the data would cause life-disrupting issues for multiple people: Put it on as many drives as possible/feasible (or storage arrays of some sort) in enough locations that you can sleep well at night.

Edit: weird thing to get a bunch of downvotes, but you do what you want with your data

Ive had this drive for 2 years no issue

This could have been a lemmy post than an “article.”

“I have a defective drive, therefore all drives are defective”

Storage can fail at any time, that’s why important data should be backed up.

Dunno what more to expect from the Verge. Have they tried putting thermal paste on it?

3tb of unprotected data? And it’s the 2nd time it’s happened? Raid1 has existed for a few years and seems pretty reliable.