1,000 petabytes. A million terabytes. One quintillion bytes (or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000). That's the amount of storage reported by users of the Ceph storage solution (across more than 3,000 Ceph clusters). The Ceph Foundation is a "directed fund" of the Linux Foundation, providing a neutral home for Ceph, "the most popular open source storage solution for modern data storage challenges" (offering an architecture that's "highly scalable, resilient, and flexible"). It's a software-defined storage platform, providing object storage, block storage, and file storage built on a common distributed cluster foundation. And Friday they announced the release of Ceph Squid, "which comes with several performance and space efficiency features along with enhanced protocol support." Ceph has solidified its position as the cornerstone of open source data storage. The release of Ceph Squid represents a significant milestone toward providing scalable, reliable, and flexible storage solutions that meet the ever-evolving demands of digital data storage. Features of Ceph Squid include improvements to BlueStore [a storage back end specifically designed for managing data on disk for Ceph Object Storage Daemon workloads] to reduce latency and CPU requirements for snapshot intensive workloads. BlueStore now uses RocksDB compression by default for increased average performance and reduced space usage. [And the next-generation Crimson OSD also has improvements in stability and read performance, and "now supports scrub, partial recovery and osdmap trimming."] Ceph continues to drive the future of storage, and welcomes developers, partners, and technology enthusiasts to get involved. Ceph Squid also brings enhancements for the CRUSH algorithm [which computes storage locations] to support more flexible and cost effective erasure coding configurations.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Seagate has joined Western Digital in increasing the prices of hard drives, with rising demand due to the huge data requirements of AI taking the blame. AI is also behind a rapid growth in orders for Enterprise solid state drives. From a report: One of the big three makers of traditional rotating hard disk drives, Seagate informed customers that it is increasing prices effective immediately for new orders, but also for any changes to orders that are "over and above" previously committed volumes. This was disclosed in a letter from the company seen by analyst Trendforce, and comes just a couple of weeks after rival manufacturer Western Digital sent out a similar letter to customers informing them of price hikes. According to Trendforce, the cause of the issue is two-fold: rising demand for high-capacity HDD products driven by the current craze for all things AI, and reduced production by hard drive manufacturers that means they are unable to meet the demand, leading to soaring prices. The rising demand comes from AI training requiring huge volumes of data: OpenAI's GPT-3 model is said to have been trained using 45TB of data, which may have been surpassed for newer models. And while flash-based SSDs boast high-speed and low-latency, storing everything in flash would still be costly. Seagate launched a 30TB hard drive line last year. Hard drive production was cut by as much as 20 percent over the last two years or so because of falling orders during the pandemic, and now manufacturers are unprepared for a sudden uptick in demand.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A recent survey found that academic organizations are failing to preserve digital material -- "including science paid for with taxpayer money," reports Ars Technica, highlighting the need for improved archiving standards and responsibilities in the digital age. From the report: The work was done by Martin Eve, a developer at Crossref. That's the organization that organizes the DOI system, which provides a permanent pointer toward digital documents, including almost every scientific publication. If updates are done properly, a DOI will always resolve to a document, even if that document gets shifted to a new URL. But it also has a way of handling documents disappearing from their expected location, as might happen if a publisher went bankrupt. There are a set of what's called "dark archives" that the public doesn't have access to, but should contain copies of anything that's had a DOI assigned. If anything goes wrong with a DOI, it should trigger the dark archives to open access, and the DOI updated to point to the copy in the dark archive. For that to work, however, copies of everything published have to be in the archives. So Eve decided to check whether that's the case. Using the Crossref database, Eve got a list of over 7 million DOIs and then checked whether the documents could be found in archives. He included well-known ones, like the Internet Archive at archive.org, as well as some dedicated to academic works, like LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe) and CLOCKSS (Controlled Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe). The results were... not great. When Eve broke down the results by publisher, less than 1 percent of the 204 publishers had put the majority of their content into multiple archives. (The cutoff was 75 percent of their content in three or more archives.) Fewer than 10 percent had put more than half their content in at least two archives. And a full third seemed to be doing no organized archiving at all. At the individual publication level, under 60 percent were present in at least one archive, and over a quarter didn't appear to be in any of the archives at all. (Another 14 percent were published too recently to have been archived or had incomplete records.) The good news is that large academic publishers appear to be reasonably good about getting things into archives; most of the unarchived issues stem from smaller publishers. Eve acknowledges that the study has limits, primarily in that there may be additional archives he hasn't checked. There are some prominent dark archives that he didn't have access to, as well as things like Sci-hub, which violates copyright in order to make material from for-profit publishers available to the public. Finally, individual publishers may have their own archiving system in place that could keep publications from disappearing. The risk here is that, ultimately, we may lose access to some academic research.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Almost 5 years ago – in my older job – I wrote about creating FreeBSD Enterprise 1 PB Storage solution. I no longer work there but one of my mates from there contacted me with interesting problem.

The FreeBSD system was installed on two Intel DC S3500 240 GB SSD drives in ZFS mirror – the usual Auto (ZFS) from the FreeBSD bsdinstall(8) installer. After the reboot the system was not able to boot – we assumed that one of these system SSDs died … and that only one disk entry was in UEFI (for the broken one) … but why? It was installed on ZFS mirror so it should be perfectly fine to boot from the still working SSD drive.

This is where some efibootmgr(8) voodoo helped.

Below is the output of efibootmgr(8) on this broken system. The information about boot disk like … evaporated … and more interesting – the SSD was not broken – both were working perfectly fine.

root@nas02:~ # efibootmgr -v
Boot to FW : false
BootCurrent: 0000
Timeout    : 15 seconds
BootOrder  : 0006, 0001, 0003, 0005, 0007
 Boot0006* USB BBS(USB,,0x0)
 Boot0001* Hard Drive BBS(HD,,0x0)
 Boot0003  Network Card BBS(Network,,0x0)
 Boot0005  UEFI: Built-in EFI Shell VenMedia(5023b95c-db26-429b-a648-bd47664c8012)
 Boot0007  UEFI: AMI Virtual CDROM0 1.00 PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x14,0x0)/USB(0x1,0x0)/USB(0x0,0x0)/CDROM(0x1,0x14,0x1000)
                      VenHw(2d6447ef-3bc9-41a0-ac19-4d51d01b4ce6,41004100410041004200420042004200430043004300430031000000)

Next – my buddy booted from the FreeBSD ISO and done zpool import zroot for the ZFS pool – to check which SSD drives were used.

root@nas02:~ # camcontrol devlist | grep -i intel
<ATA INTEL SSDSC2KB24 0100> at scbus3 target 75 lun 0 (pass11,da10)
<ATA INTEL SSDSC2KB24 0100> at scbus4 target 124 lun 0 (pass91,da87)

root@nas02:~ # zpool status zroot | grep da
            da87p4 ONLINE 0 0 0
            da10p4 ONLINE 0 0 0

Then check if contents of UEFI partition are correct – if the bootx64.efi file is in its place.

root@nas02:~ # mount -t msdosfs /dev/da10p1 /mnt

root@nas02:~ # ls -l /mnt/efi/boot
bootx64.efi

root@nas02:~ # umount /mnt

root@nas02:~ # mount -t msdosfs /dev/da87p1 /mnt

root@nas02:~ # ls -l /mnt/efi/boot
bootx64.efi

root@nas02:~ # umount /mnt

Everything seemed where it should be. Next step was to add that UEFI entry in the efibootmgr(8) command.

root@nas02:~ # efibootmgr -b 0000 -c -l da10p1:/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.efi -L "FreeBSD 1st"

root@nas02:~ # efibootmgr -v
Boot to FW : false
BootCurrent: 0000
Timeout    : 15 seconds
BootOrder  : 0000, 0006, 0001, 0003, 0005, 0007
+Boot0000* FreeBSD 1st HD(1,GPT,81d75631-7e16-11e9-beb3-a0423f3b9d64,0x28,0x64000)/File(\EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI)
                      da10p1:/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI (null)
 Boot0006* USB BBS(USB,,0x0)
 Boot0001* Hard Drive BBS(HD,,0x0)
 Boot0003  Network Card BBS(Network,,0x0)
 Boot0005  UEFI: Built-in EFI Shell VenMedia(5023b95c-db26-429b-a648-bd47664c8012)
 Boot0007  UEFI: AMI Virtual CDROM0 1.00 PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x14,0x0)/USB(0x1,0x0)/USB(0x0,0x0)/CDROM(0x1,0x14,0x1000)
                      VenHw(2d6447ef-3bc9-41a0-ac19-4d51d01b4ce6,41004100410041004200420042004200430043004300430031000000)

… and that was it. The FreeBSD system booted just fine with both SSDs intact.

In the next step my buddy also added second UEFI entry to make sure that the other SSD (da87) will be used in case the first one (da10) died.

root@nas02:~ # efibootmgr -b 0008 -c -l da87p1:/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.efi -L "FreeBSD 2nd"

root@nas02:~ # efibootmgr -v
Boot to FW : false
BootCurrent: 0000
Timeout    : 15 seconds
BootOrder  : 0008, 0000, 0006, 0001, 0003, 0005, 0007
 Boot0008  FreeBSD 2nd HD(1,GPT,8186155f-7e16-11e9-beb3-a0423f3b9d64,0x28,0x64000)/File(\EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.efi)
                      da87p1:/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.efi (null)
+Boot0000* FreeBSD 1st HD(1,GPT,81d75631-7e16-11e9-beb3-a0423f3b9d64,0x28,0x64000)/File(\EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI)
                      da10p1:/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI (null)
 Boot0006* USB BBS(USB,,0x0)
 Boot0001* Hard Drive BBS(HD,,0x0)
 Boot0003  Network Card BBS(Network,,0x0)
 Boot0005  UEFI: Built-in EFI Shell VenMedia(5023b95c-db26-429b-a648-bd47664c8012)
 Boot0007  UEFI: AMI Virtual CDROM0 1.00 PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x14,0x0)/USB(0x1,0x0)/USB(0x0,0x0)/CDROM(0x1,0x14,0x1000)
                      VenHw(2d6447ef-3bc9-41a0-ac19-4d51d01b4ce6,41004100410041004200420042004200430043004300430031000000)

Now two SSD entries are configured in UEFI using efibootmgr(8) tool.

Not a long article this time – but I believe very important one.

Take care.

Backblaze has published a report on hard drive failures for 2023, finding that rates increased during the year due to aging drives that it plans to upgrade. From a report: Backblaze, which focuses on cloud-based storage services, claims to have more than three exabytes of data storage under its management. As of the end of last year, the company monitored 270,222 hard drives used for data storage, some of which are excluded from the statistics because they are still being evaluated. That still left a collection of 269,756 hard drives comprised of 35 drive models. Statistics on SSDs used as boot drives are reported separately. Backblaze found one drive model exhibited zero failures for all of 2023, the Seagate 8 TB ST8000NM000A. However, this came with the caveat that there are only 204 examples in service, and these were deployed only since Q3 2022, so have accumulated a limited number of drive days (total time operational). Nevertheless, as Backblaze's principal cloud storage evangelist Andy Klein pointed out: "Zero failures over 18 months is a nice start."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new report from German data recovery company CBL found that devices using NAND chips from reputable brands are declining in quality, with reduced capacity and their manufacturers' logo removed. Furthermore, some USB sticks use the old trick of soldiering a microSD card onto the board. TechSpot reports: Most of the janky USB sticks CBL examined were promotional gifts, the kind given away free with products or by companies at conferences. However, there were some "branded" products that fell into the same inferior-quality category, though CBL didn't say if these were well-known mainstream brands or the kind of brands you've probably never heard of. Technological advancements have also affected these NAND chips, but not in a good way. The chips originally used single-level cell (SLC) memory cells that only stored one bit each, offering less data density but better performance and reliability. In order to increase the amount of storage the chips offered, manufacturers started moving to four bits per cell (QLC), decreasing the endurance and retention. Combined with the questionable components, it's why CBL warns that "You shouldn't rely too much on the reliability of flash memory." The report illustrates how some of the components found in the devices had their manufactures' names removed or obscured. One simply printed text over the top of the company name, while another had been scrubbed off completely. There's also a photo of a microSD card found inside a USB stick that had all of its identifying markings removed. It's always wise to be careful when choosing your storage device and beware of offers that seem too good to be true.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Enlarge / Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4080. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

If you're building a new PC, there's no time like Amazon's big Prime Day sale to grab a deal on PC parts. Components like fans, motherboards, CPUs, and GPUs are all on sale. Whether you're starting from scratch on building your own powerful gaming rig or workstation, or you're upgrading an existing build, we have some options.

GPU deals on RTX graphics cards

• ZOTAC Gaming GeForce RTX 3060 Twin Edge OC for $261 (was $340) at Amazon
• ZOTAC Gaming GeForce RTX 4080 16GB Trinity OC for $990 (was $1,300) at Amazon
• PowerColor Fighter AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT Gaming Graphics Card with 12GB GDDR6 Memory for $300 (was $350) at Amazon
• ZOTAC Gaming GeForce RTX 4070 AMP AIRO Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse Inspired Graphics Card Bundle for $585 (was $700) at Amazon
• EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 SC GAMING for $200 (was $360) at Amazon
• Intel Arc A750 Limited Edition 8GB PCI Express 4.0 Graphics Card for $200 (was $220) at Amazon
• ASUS Dual NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 OC Edition Gaming Graphics Card for $230 (was $300) at Amazon
• ASUS ROG Strix NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Gaming Graphics Card for $870 (was $950) at Amazon
• XFX Speedster QICK319 Radeon RX 6750XT Gaming Graphics Card for $350 (was $430) at Amazon
• XFX Speedster SWFT319 Radeon RX 6800 Gaming Graphics Card for $400 (was $490) at Amazon
• ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 4060 Ti OC Edition Gaming Graphics Card for $415 (was $460) at Amazon

Storage and RAM

• Lexar NQ100 480GB 2.5-inch SATA III Internal SSD for $18 (was $33) at Amazon
• Lexar NQ100 1.92TB 2.5-inch SATA III Internal SSD for $62 (was $88) at Amazon
• Crucial P3 Plus 4TB PCIe Gen4 3D NAND NVMe M.2 SSD for $180 (was $226) at Amazon
• Crucial P3 4TB PCIe Gen3 3D NAND NVMe M.2 SSD for $160 (was $230) at Amazon
• Crucial MX500 4TB 3D NAND SATA 2.5 Inch Internal SSD for $165 (was $204) at Amazon
• Crucial Pro RAM 64GB Kit DDR4 3200MT/s for $100 (was $142) at Amazon
• Lexar NM790 SSD 2TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe M.2 2280 Internal Solid State Drive for $87 (was $125) at Amazon
• Lexar NM790 SSD 1TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe M.2 2280 Internal Solid State Drive for $45 (was $70) at Amazon
• Lexar NM790 SSD 512GB PCIe Gen4 NVMe M.2 2280 Internal Solid State Drive for $37 (was $50) at Amazon
• Lexar ARES RGB 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4 RAM 3600MT/s CL18 Desktop Memory for $55 (was $80) at Amazon
• Crucial T700 4TB Gen5 NVMe M.2 SSD for $390 (was $600) at Amazon
• Crucial T700 4TB Gen5 NVMe M.2 SSD with heatsink for $410 (was $630) at Amazon
• Lexar NQ100 960GB 2.5-inch SATA III Internal SSD for $33 (was $48) at Amazon
• Lexar ARES RGB 32GB (2x16GB) DDR5 RAM 6000MT/s CL34 Desktop Memory for $76 (was $120) at Amazon
• Lexar ARES RGB 32GB (2x16GB) DDR5 RAM 5600MT/s CL32 Desktop Memory for $72 (was $110) at Amazon
• PNY CS2241 4TB M.2 NVMe Gen4 x4 Internal Solid State Drive for $175 (was $220) at Amazon
• CORSAIR VENGEANCE RGB DDR5 RAM 32GB (2x16GB) 5200 MHz CL40 for $90 (was $100) at Amazon

CPU deals on Intel and AMD processors

• Intel Core i5-12600KF Desktop Processor 10 (6P+4E) Cores for $163 (was $199) at Amazon
• Intel Core i7-12700K Desktop Processor with Integrated Graphics for $239 (was $276) at Amazon
• Intel Core i5-12600K Desktop Processor with Integrated Graphics for $179 (was $194) at Amazon
• AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-core, 24-Thread Unlocked Desktop Processor for $297 (was $570) at Amazon
• Intel Core i7-13700K Desktop Processor with Integrated Graphics for $373 (was $419) at Amazon
• AMD Ryzen 9 7900X 12-Core, 24-Thread Unlocked Desktop Processor for $382 (was $549) at Amazon
• AMD Ryzen 9 7950X 16-Core, 32-Thread Unlocked Desktop Processor for $509 (was $699) at Amazon
• AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D 16-Core, 32-Thread Desktop Processor for $599 (was $699) at Amazon
• AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D 8-core, 16-Thread Desktop Processor for $307 (was $319) at Amazon
• Intel Core i7-12700KF Desktop Processor for $219 (was $259) at Amazon
• Intel Core i9-12900K Gaming Desktop Processor with Integrated Graphics and 16 (8P+8E) Cores for $327 (was $379) at Amazon
• AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 8-core, 16-Thread Unlocked Desktop Processor for $215 (was $449) at Amazon
• Intel Core i9-12900KF Desktop Processor for $318 (was $373) at Amazon
• Intel Core i9-12900KS Gaming Desktop Processor for $349 (was $400) at Amazon

Motherboards

• ASUS Prime B550-PLUS AMD AM4 Zen 3 Ryzen 5000 & 3rd Gen Ryzen ATX Motherboard for $100 (was $140) at Amazon
• GIGABYTE B650 Gaming X AX (AM5/ LGA 1718/ AMD/ B650 for $162 (was $200) at Amazon
• ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Hero (WiFi 6E) LGA 1700 (Intel 13th & 12th Gen) ATX Motherboard for $540 (was $609) at Amazon
• Gigabyte B550 AORUS ELITE AX V2 for $144 (was $190) at Amazon
• ASUS Prime Z790-A WiFi 6E LGA 1700 (Intel 13th & 12th) ATX Motherboard for $250 (was $310) at Amazon
• ASUS TUF Gaming Z790-Plus WiFi D4 LGA 1700 (Intel 12th & 13th Gen) ATX Motherboard for $200 (was $230) at Amazon
• ASUS Prime X670E-PRO WiFi Socket AM5 (LGA 1718) Ryzen 7000 ATX Motherboard for $290 (was $350) at Amazon
• ASUS Strix STRIX Z790-A WIFI D4 Desktop Motherboard for $285 (was $350) at Amazon
• MSI MPG Z690 Edge WiFi DDR4 Gaming Motherboard for $220 (was $300) at Amazon
• GIGABYTE Z790 AORUS Elite AX DDR4 for $207 (was $260) at Amazon
• MSI B550 Gaming GEN3 Gaming Motherboard for $100 (was $120) at Amazon
• ASUS Prime X670-P Socket AM5 (LGA 1718) Ryzen 7000 ATX Motherboard for $200 (was $270) at Amazon
• ASUS Prime H770-PLUS D4 Intel H770(13th and 12th Gen) LGA 1700 ATX Motherboard for $100 (was $160) at Amazon
• ASUS ROG Strix B550-A Gaming AMD AM4 Zen 3 Ryzen 5000 & 3rd Gen Ryzen ATX Motherboard for $160 (was $180) at Amazon
• MSI PRO Z790-A Wi-Fi ProSeries Motherboard (Supports 12th/13th Gen Intel Processors) for $190 (was $280) at Amazon
• MSI MEG Z690 Unify Gaming Motherboard for $290 (was $330) at Amazon

Power Supply Units

• ASUS ROG STRIX 1000W Gold PSU, Power Supply for $160 (was $210) at Amazon
• Cooler Master MWE Gold 850 V2 Full Modular for $95 (was $100) at Amazon
• EVGA 100-N1-0650-L1, 650 N1, 650 W for $44 (was $65) at Amazon
• EVGA Supernova 1600 G+, 80+ Gold 1600 W for $210 (was $350) at Amazon
• Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 850 W 80+ Gold SLI/ CrossFire Ready Ultra Quiet 140mm Hydraulic Bearing Smart Zero Fan for $100 (was $140) at Amazon
• Thermaltake Toughpower 750 W 80 Plus Gold Semi Modular PSU ATX for $80 (was $110) at Amazon
• Thermaltake Toughpower GF3 850 W for $110 (was $160) at Amazon
• EVGA SuperNOVA 1300 GT, 80 Plus Gold 1300 W for $180 (was $250) at Amazon
• ASUS ROG Thor 850W Platinum II for $170 (was $250) at Amazon
• EVGA Supernova 1000 P3, 80 Plus Platinum 1000 W for $210 (was $250) at Amazon
• EVGA Supernova 1000 G7, 80 Plus Gold 1000 W for $180 (was $240) at Amazon
• Thermaltake TOUGHLIQUID 360 ARGB Motherboard Sync All-in-One Liquid CPU Cooler for $100 (was $140) at Amazon
• GIGABYTE GP-UD850GM PG5 Rev2.0 850W PCIe 5.0 Ready for $97 (was $140) at Amazon
• Thermaltake Toughpower GF3 1350W for $208 (was $260) at Amazon
• Corsair HX1000i Fully Modular Ultra-Low Noise ATX Power Supply - ATX 3.0 & PCIe 5.0 Compliant for $230 (was $260) at Amazon

Fans and coolers

• Cooler Master Hyper 212 Halo Black CPU Air Cooler for $33 (was $45) at Amazon
• MSI MAG CoreLiquid 360R V2 - AIO ARGB CPU Liquid Cooler for $95 (was $140) at Amazon
• NZXT Kraken 280 RGB - RL-KR280-B1 - 280 mm AIO CPU Liquid Cooler for $142 (was $200) at Amazon
• Cooler Master MasterLiquid 360L Core 360 mm Close-Loop AIO Liquid Cooler for $101 (was $120) at Amazon
• Cooler Master MasterLiquid 240L Core 240 mm Close-Loop AIO Liquid Cooler for $85 (was $100) at Amazon
• AORUS WATERFORCE X 360 AIO Liquid CPU Cooler for $187 ($240) at Amazon
• ASUS ROG RYUO III 360 ARGB All-in-one AIO Liquid CPU Cooler 360 mm Radiator for $245 (was $290) at Amazon
• MSI MAG CoreLiquid C240 - AIO ARGB CPU Liquid Cooler - 240 mm Radiator for $90 (was $120) at Amazon
• Thermaltake Riing Quad 120 mm 16.8 Million RGB Color 9 Blades Hydraulic Bearing Case/Radiator Fan for $90 (was $120) at Amazon

Cases and towers

• ASUS TUF Gaming GT501 Mid-Tower Computer Case for up to EATX Motherboards for $135 (was $180) at Amazon
• ASUS TUF Gaming GT502 ATX Mid-Tower Computer Case for $140 (was $170) at Amazon
• Thermaltake Tower 200 Mini-ITX Computer Case for $100 (was $130) at Amazon
• CORSAIR Crystal Series 680X RGB High Airflow Tempered Glass ATX Smart Case, Black for $193 (was $275) at Amazon
• Corsair 5000D Tempered Glass Mid-Tower ATX PC Case - White for $165 (was $175) at Amazon
• Thermaltake Core P3 Pro E-ATX Tempered Glass Mid Tower for $120 (was $160) at Amazon
• Antec NX200 M, Micro-ATX Tower, Mini-Tower Computer Case for $44 (was $65) at Amazon
• Corsair iCUE 220T RGB AIRFLOW Tempered Glass Mid-Tower Smart ATX Case for $70 (was $125) at Amazon
• Corsair Carbide Series 175R RGB Tempered Glass Mid-Tower ATX Gaming Case for $53 (was $85) at Amazon

Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs .

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Enlarge (credit: Western Digital )

When should you be concerned about a NAS hard drive failing? Multiple factors are at play, so many might turn to various SMART (self-monitoring, analysis, and reporting technology) data . When it comes to how long the drive has been active, there are backup companies like Backblaze using hard drives that are nearly 8 years old. That may be why some customers have been panicked, confused, and/or angered to see their Western Digital NAS hard drive automatically given a warning label in Synology's DiskStation Manager (DSM) after they were powered on for three years. With no other factors considered for these automatic flags, Western Digital is accused of age-shaming drives to push people to buy new HDDs prematurely.

The practice's revelation is the last straw for some users. Western Digital already had a steep climb to win back NAS customers' trust after shipping NAS drives with SMR (shingled magnetic recording) instead of CMR (conventional magnetic recording). Now, some are saying they won't use or recommend the company's hard drives anymore.

“Warning,” your NAS drive’s been on for 3 years

As users have reported online, including on Synology-focused and Synology's own forums , as well as on Reddit and YouTube, Western Digital drives using Western Device Digital Analytics ( WDDA ) are getting a "warning" stamp in Synology DSM once their power-on hours count hits the three-year mark. WDDA is similar to SMART monitoring and rival offerings, like Seagate's IronWolf , and is supposed to provide analytics and actionable items.

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.

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