Non-technical users don't really buy hard drives individually, they would at most ask their computer-savvy friend or go to a shop who will replace it for them.

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

These are external drives, and I'd guess the vast majority of external drives are purchased by non-technical users.

> Non-technical users don't really buy hard drives individually

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.

Internal drives, you're right, likely wouldn't be bought by a non-techie alone.

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

Your slight editorial opinion reminded me of this HN hot-take from the DropBox announcement:

> 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

This is how non-technical users learn. How about.. don't have an internet connected drive? That's what I'll tell my family.

they said the same thing about tylenol in 1982.

Somebody actually poisoned Tylenol. People realize that all the food they eat could have been poisoned in the grocery store. There's no easy mapping to "every external hard drive manufacturer could stop updating their products and your data could spontaneously delete itself."

True, a small computer running an Internet connected general purpose operating system should have a prominently labeled expiration date of some short time after the last patch. Use after that date is not recommended and potentially dangerous. WD sold something that looked like a toaster to the consumer but was actually a lump of cheese.

There have been incidents of (other manufacturers') hard drives shipping with pre-installed malware though [e.g. 0]. I think that's a good analogue for Tylenol.

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