This is not specific to Synology, but it’s a gimmick specific to WD surveillance drives.
Since surveillance drives are optimized for the usecase opposite to storj, and since that “feature” requires host support, this is a rather niche issue, one of many, Synology owners, who also buy purple drives, have to deal with…
And by have to deal with I mean turning off gimmicks that marketing departments in both companies relentlessly try to shove to their customer throats. (As you may have guessed, I’m former Synology user, not a happy one)
Relax and restrict yourself to the parameters that really matter: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-smart-stats-indicate-hard-drive-failures/ and https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-smart-stats/. Further the failure rate of drives seems to be quite stable/linear for at least five years.
WD Red Pro’s are also impacted. They are specifically NAS drives. and it is not impacted on other NAS systems like TrueNAS as yet - this specifically applies to Synology.
Let’s be clear here. This is a noisy reporting gimmick that WD introduced. Correct way to handle it is to ignore. Synology chose to surface those bullshit notifications to the user. In that sense — yes, this obnoxiousness is specific to Synology and others who chose to do the same, because “interoperations” and “partnership” and “full support” and we can charge now more for the same drives. It’s not the first time they pull that off and not the last one.
So, turn off that reporting. IIRC last time they did that it was possible to disable.
Generally it is not possible to predict drive failure. Smart data helps in some limited cases — e.g. if bad sector count (or error rate) is increasing — there is a chance it will continue increasing so it may make sense to preemptively replace the disk with the one that has stable bad sector count (or error rate). But that’s pretty much it.
One way to handle it in redundant systems — ignore those gimmicks up to and including smart. Run periodic scrubs. If the disk fails to write and read data — the raid controller will tell you. Then you replace the disk. Until then — keep using it, regardless of what those systems tell you: the only action they will nudge you to do is prematurely replace disk —> buy new disk —> moar profit. You as a user don’t benefit at all.
Agree, I actually only check SMART data as long as there is warranty in order to claim it and get a new drive. But otherwise I wait till the drive fails. Especially in the case of STORJ.
Wow! This is big. WD is starting to loose fans.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/clearly-predatory-western-digital-sparks-panic-anger-for-age-shaming-hdds/
I think “doubling down” would be a better term here :). It’s not the first time they tried some sort of marketing shenanigans.
Yes, the whole hiding of SMR was their ploy as well.