Unlucky WD Ultrastar drives are knackered, need replacing ASAP El Reg has received an antipodean note that a number of Western Digital enterprise disk drives are having problems and need to be replaced. WD spokesman Paul Wooding said: We have identified a small, isolated population of HGST Ultrastar disk drives demonstrating higher than expected failure rates when used in specific …
Well at least they admit there is an issue, unlike an other brand which i wont mention... who has a long history of knowing drives had an issue and kept on sending them out the door with their fingers in their ears singing la la la la. i would use a WD drive for magnetic storage over competitors every time.
Yes. Disc drives fail. What is the differentiator is how the company deals with the situation. I also prefer WD to other (un)named companies' disc drive products. First of all, they run a LOT cooler, which when you run them 24x365 that is critical. Second, my SMART monitor indicates they have a lot fewer sector failures over time.
Here's what happened: As the go-to-tech guy for colleagues, family and friends, I recommended WD to them, which was a monumental mistake. The WD Passports all failed with the blue-light-of-death just outside warranty or just inside. However, returning wasn't always an option: A. People were busy... B. Returning products In the US is trivial but outside (EU/Latam) its more complicated.
They do seem to have a finite pre-determined shelf life, when filled with Helium.
Not finding the WD Reds that reliable either. Nasware 2.0 Versions, not 3.0 Versions. 18 months was the first failure and they sit at a cool operating temp all the time. The WD Diagnostic tool is overly optimistic too, stating drive had repaired itself, when it clearly hadn't.
We have Hitacti drives too, that always show 1 degree lower temp (sit along the WD reds) and have been rock solid. Trouble is, you can no longer buy them.
Far too many variations of late, too. Reds, Purple, Gold, Black, Blue etc. I can't even remember the Seagate branding off the top of my head, Skyhawk is one.
Since Wikipedia says "Stuckism is an international art movement founded in 1999 by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson to promote figurative painting as opposed to conceptual art" I suspect the answer is "No".
On the other hand, I may have missed the extremely obvious and amazingly funny joke...
"Since Wikipedia says "Stuckism is..."
I am thinking the answer is to ignore Wikipedia and look at the Stuckist manifesto. I suspect the gpp poster is thinking of clause 20
"Stuckism embraces all that it denounces. We only denounce that which stops at the starting point — Stuckism starts at the stopping point!"
This does sound a bit like the usual means to fix a hard disk which is having a bit of stiction. But yes, obscure.
I've called them Western Dataloss for years. Looks like they've finally brought down the HGST line to their standard lack of quality.
I've installed more Seagate drives over the years than any other. I've pulled more dead Western Dataloss drives out of systems than any other. At least 50% of the dead drives I've had to replace over the years (and yes, that includes the IBM Deathstar drives in the total) have been Western Dataloss.
No drive manufacturer is perfect.
And none is as bad as WD.
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