Because if you need a hard drive, your options are pretty much Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba, and they've all had their own problems.

The affected product is not a drive but a NAS solution. In terms of being a reasonable consumer my thought process is to evaluate distinctive products differently.

NAS is a cheap computer with attached drives. It’s going to have computer-like failure modes.

I highly doubt the average non-technical user even knows who produced the hard drive they own.

Yes, they do. My dad bought two WD My Book drives by himself as backup drives. He luckily was not aware that those things have an extra software for backups, nor how to install it, but those things are just sold like that targeted to the average user in your average computer store.

But THIS affected type of drive is specifically marketed to a very non-technical user, and I can certainly confirm my non-technical friends and family have bought products in this segment independently, whereas my techie friends steer clear.

It's a NAS that's made to look like a drive. My techie friends would never buy it - they'd get Synology/QNAP, or do their own over-complicated time-consuming solution (slight editorial opinion there ;), or use cloud backup, or some combo. But my dad, mother in law, and other relatives have products like this, and have purchased them on their own. In fact, I think when asked, most techies would in fact go against the notion of buying cheap but internet-exposed storage device for a non-technical friend :O

> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/malware-found-on-new-hard-driv...

But I might be reading too literally. And personally, I do intend to continue purchasing Western Digital hard drives, just nothing internet connected, because I agree they're different products with different risks.

The difference is the protocol that goes over the link. In a NAS, it's SMB/NFS access to files over ethernet/wifi, and for a SATA drive it is the SATA command set accessing blocks. The difference is small.

One of these things is talking to the internet on its own accord. The other is not. Small difference, huge implications.

This is the third such major scandal from WD in as many years. First, selling SMR drives as CMR. Second, selling 7200RPM drives as 5400RPM. Now this. They've lost a lot of credibility, and I don't see any of the other manufacturers having issues rivaling WD.

I suppose you mean the other way around? Otherwise, what's the problem with selling a higher RPM device as a lower one? Isn't higher RPM better? (Genuine question, I don't know much about HDD).

They also draw more power, which might mean they simply don't work properly in some low-power devices, or mean that any UPS someone might have one connected to will not last as long as they expect during a power interruption.

WD Red is marketed for NAS/storage, where it's not uncommon to have 4/8/12/16 drives in the same chassis where noise/heat becomes a very different problem. It turns out that the drives generated the same heat and consumed the same power as 7200RPM drives, while the data sheets were outright lies and BS. WD decided on double down on the BS for several months, and only recently released new SKUs where the specs matched the marketing.

They sourced drives from former HGST under WD but 5K4 we’re not available so marketing rebadged 7K2 as “5400rpm-class” and lucky buyers were hit with better performances.

Sort of. The WD Red drives outperformed actual 5400 drives but underperformed other 7200 drives by a large margin (180MB/s vs. 230MB/s), while not necessarily offering heat or noise benefits that matched. My current 8x8TB WD Red Unraid build will likely be the last WD drives I buy for a long time.

Less noise and usually higher durability.

WD cut down the number of real SKUs and then slowed down a 7200 RPM drive in firmware calling them "5400rpm class"

There are quite a few other brands offering NAS devices e.g. Synology, QNAP, Thecus, Pegasus and more.

Aha! It was $600k in dogecoin in 2014

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2364120/hacked-synology-nas-...

That’s worth around $125m today (assuming straight hodling).

Majority of people buy NAS only use it to access their Data within their internal network. But somehow they all include Internet / Cloud features as upsell.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/qnap-removes-...

Of course the issues shouldn't be there in the first place, but it's not like they're ignoring the problem.

What? They backdoored every device.

https://www.synology.com/en-us/company/news/article/2019July...

Unless WD changed their mind again, HGST HDD is still available as of 2021 because customer has been demanding the exact same HDD with exact same model number from the exact same plant. Basically they want to know it is the same old HGST and not WD. And some ( if not most ) of them are large, enterprise customers. So they brought it back in ~2019 (without an announcement).

Edit: To be clear, it was my mistake, my post made no sense before I fixed it. The parent doesn't deserve the downvotes.

(Not that I would put anything like this past them; Japanese companies are notorious for leaving ancient buggy software at EoL)

Using 500GB SSD for many years as an external backup.

[1]: https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/14/wd-red-nas-drives-shin...

Seagate is the other big consumer brand and they also have their own set of issues. Anecdotally, I've had multiple Seagate drives die within a year or 2 whereas WD ones have kept going for years longer.

I'd hope it gives you some pause when considering "cloud" products as well, that was the reason I avoided this.

Backblaze does a survey every quarter, here is the latest one https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1...

They are all in the same ballpark, with Seagate a bit worse than the others but not terrible like it was a few years ago. WD tends to be consistently in the middle of the pack.

The latest fail from WD (as a hard drive manufacturer) was when they sneaked inadequate SMR technology into "red" consumer-grade NAS drives. But others did more or less the same. Now, all manufacturers are transparent about the technology used and newer "red plus" drives from WD are CMR.

So I'd say, for now, I'd say WD is as good (or as bad) as any other and I would let price decide. For reliability, that's what RAID is for. And in any case, RAID or not, and no matter how reliable your disks are, if your data is precious, you need backups too.

Needless to say, I never ran any of the Live code. Several of these sorts of things have come up in the industry that always made me recall how happy I was to not have those drives with their backdoors on my network.

But hey, if you just got a ransomware note, and think "I'm good, I have my backups!", wouldn't you want to flip the read-only switch before plugging in those backup drives? I would. In fact, I'd flip that switch always before trying to read from a backup drive.

WD really messed up there - but they and others will mess up again, so if the user's goal is not losing any data they'll still need to do more than buy the next shiny thing and click "accept" on the EULA. Because in the end pushing around the blame won't get you the files back.

I presume you mean shouldn't rather than should.

The drive happens to be Toshiba, but that is just a medium