Snippet: Western Digital Sparks Panic, Anger for Age-Shaming HDDs ☇

Scharon Harding for Ars Technica:

The recommended action says: “The drive has accumulated a large number of power on hours [throughout] the entire life of the drive. Please consider to replace the drive soon.” There seem to be no discernible problems with the hard drives otherwise.

Synology confirmed this to Ars Technica and noted that the labels come from Western Digital, not Synology. A spokesperson said the “WDDA monitoring and testing subsystem is developed by Western Digital, including the warning after they reach a certain number of power-on-hours.” […]

Further, you can’t repair a pool with a drive marked with a warning label.

“Only drives with a healthy status can be used to repair or expand a storage pool,” Synology’s spokesperson said. “Users will need to first suppress the warning or disable WDDA to continue.”

My Synology has two Western Digital Red drives, one from 2016 and one from 2021. The older one may be outside of the window, but I’ll keep an eye on warnings from the more recent one (and probably ignore them). Nonetheless, it feels like a move to turn every tech thing into an inkjet printer.