I don’t really understand what they hope to achieve with this. If I saw this warning, I would read it as ‘WD drives have a maximum lifespan of 3 years’ and would factor that into my future purchasing decisions accordingly (especially when some other vendors have longer warranty periods than that now).
I’m still waiting for CPUs that have to be paid per cycle. So basically you pay the CPU chip maker and then it downloads a certificate and then it’ll run for, say, 50 trillion cycles, after which the certificate is invalidated and a new one has to be bought, otherwise the CPU will not budge. That would be one of the purest forms of rent-seeking imaginable.
That is exactly how z/OS hardware was billed (and probably in some cases still is). MIPS/MSU capacity billing is a thing there. It also (kind of) makes sense: you own a mainframe, you do most of your bulk processing end-of-quarter, which requires a lot of resources, so why not pay for that capacity when you use it (and not all the time).
This also means that IBM hardware you have has theoretical processing power, it’s just locked until you pay for it :-)
So pretty much “the cloud at home”? Do you pay for the hardware itself, or does it just get installed and you pay for use (with some fixed capacity I assume)?
Also how does it work exactly, does the z machine have a permanent link to IBM, or does IBM just pull usage data (possibly in person) at some frequency like utilities?
…or does it just get installed and you pay for use…does the z machine have a permanent link to IBM…
Basically, yeah, from what I understood when I worked there.
The IBM model of billing for computing is how this whole computing thing got started. The home computing revolution might just be blip in history where, for a short time, individuals owned machines instead of companies.
However you probably need some sort of WDDA driver installed to get the reports.
Synology has built-in wdda, so you get it automatically if you use WD drives, other users — non enterprise anyway — are unlikely to have even considered installing management software for their hard drives.
The article says that the WD drives use WDDA (not SMART) and that the testing subsystem + warning come from WD. Further the reason why Synology users are specifically upset is this little nugget. “Further, you can’t repair a pool with a drive marked with a warning label.”
So - WD’s self-developed, non-standard analytics system decides that after 3 years, you should chuck any drive out of your NAS and replace it with a new one. Because after that, unless you disable the health checks, you can’t repair a pool with a drive that’s gone past the 3 year mark.
It wouldn’t be so bad if you were disabling just that check, but I believe that also means you’ll miss legit warnings about temperature and errors.
If you look at Backblaze’s regular drive stat reports, they talk about having drives in service for upwards of 90 months. I’d consider three years a bare minimum lifespan to expect out of a drive, not a maximum.
I’m always surprised people don’t try to tie in some sort of subscription to SSDs. You could hide another system area in a different locked physical NAND cell that people could pay to unlock when the SSD experiences sudden failure and you need to recover data. Or even when the wear leveling reaches a certain point you unlock just new NAND cells for usage. I bet it would work for a fair number of use cases since the system area cannot be wear-leveled and is a common point for failure.
Pay WD $400 and suddenly your SSD is readable again and has enough cells to allow for wear leveling long enough to get data off and maybe even continue to use it for some period of time. It’s scummy but I wonder if it could work. Since manufacturers have a pretty good idea of how long an SSD should last in terms of r/w you could also maybe wire in a pop-up like “your drive is close to dying, pay $200 for WD Expand+” and then activate the additional locked cells.
I don’t really understand what they hope to achieve with this. If I saw this warning, I would read it as ‘WD drives have a maximum lifespan of 3 years’ and would factor that into my future purchasing decisions accordingly (especially when some other vendors have longer warranty periods than that now).
According to the article, one of the WD drive models doing this has a five-year warranty!
Amazing no scumbag has tried this before, tbh.
I’m still waiting for CPUs that have to be paid per cycle. So basically you pay the CPU chip maker and then it downloads a certificate and then it’ll run for, say, 50 trillion cycles, after which the certificate is invalidated and a new one has to be bought, otherwise the CPU will not budge. That would be one of the purest forms of rent-seeking imaginable.
AWS?
I mean chips that you physically own yet still have to rent.
[Comment removed by author]
Isn’t that more or less how IBM charges for their mainframe systems?
That is exactly how z/OS hardware was billed (and probably in some cases still is). MIPS/MSU capacity billing is a thing there. It also (kind of) makes sense: you own a mainframe, you do most of your bulk processing end-of-quarter, which requires a lot of resources, so why not pay for that capacity when you use it (and not all the time).
This also means that IBM hardware you have has theoretical processing power, it’s just locked until you pay for it :-)
So pretty much “the cloud at home”? Do you pay for the hardware itself, or does it just get installed and you pay for use (with some fixed capacity I assume)?
Also how does it work exactly, does the z machine have a permanent link to IBM, or does IBM just pull usage data (possibly in person) at some frequency like utilities?
Basically, yeah, from what I understood when I worked there.
The IBM model of billing for computing is how this whole computing thing got started. The home computing revolution might just be blip in history where, for a short time, individuals owned machines instead of companies.
Oracle literally did this years ago for some hardware JVM features.
This is really dodgy - if you bought the drive with a sticker that said “will need replacing in 3 years” you’d go for another brand.
It mentions that Synology users specifically are upset by this.
Is the warning issued from WD’s drives via SMART? Or is this warning entirely implemented on Synology’s end?
“Synology confirmed this to Ars Technica and noted that the labels come from Western Digital, not Synology”
Also “Western Digital drives using Western Digital Device Analytics (WDDA) are getting a ‘warning’ stamp”
This is pretty much Western Digital.
However you probably need some sort of WDDA driver installed to get the reports.
Synology has built-in wdda, so you get it automatically if you use WD drives, other users — non enterprise anyway — are unlikely to have even considered installing management software for their hard drives.
The article says that the WD drives use WDDA (not SMART) and that the testing subsystem + warning come from WD. Further the reason why Synology users are specifically upset is this little nugget. “Further, you can’t repair a pool with a drive marked with a warning label.”
So - WD’s self-developed, non-standard analytics system decides that after 3 years, you should chuck any drive out of your NAS and replace it with a new one. Because after that, unless you disable the health checks, you can’t repair a pool with a drive that’s gone past the 3 year mark.
It wouldn’t be so bad if you were disabling just that check, but I believe that also means you’ll miss legit warnings about temperature and errors.
If you look at Backblaze’s regular drive stat reports, they talk about having drives in service for upwards of 90 months. I’d consider three years a bare minimum lifespan to expect out of a drive, not a maximum.
Makes the whole self-warning system unusable, because you can’t tell anymore whether it’s real or not. What’s next, smart values ?
I’m always surprised people don’t try to tie in some sort of subscription to SSDs. You could hide another system area in a different locked physical NAND cell that people could pay to unlock when the SSD experiences sudden failure and you need to recover data. Or even when the wear leveling reaches a certain point you unlock just new NAND cells for usage. I bet it would work for a fair number of use cases since the system area cannot be wear-leveled and is a common point for failure.
Pay WD $400 and suddenly your SSD is readable again and has enough cells to allow for wear leveling long enough to get data off and maybe even continue to use it for some period of time. It’s scummy but I wonder if it could work. Since manufacturers have a pretty good idea of how long an SSD should last in terms of r/w you could also maybe wire in a pop-up like “your drive is close to dying, pay $200 for WD Expand+” and then activate the additional locked cells.
[Comment removed by author]