Anyone else have a similar experience with one of these drives?
What the fuck are all these comments?
It’s an article about an unresolved and recurring problem with a popular drive that the ostensibly reputable manufacturer is trying to hide.
But 90% of the comments are people jerking themselves off about how smart they are for using RAID, which is irrelevant to the point of the article… But never miss an opportunity to pleasure yourself in public I guess?
Lemmy definitely showing the same symptoms as Reddit as it grows. Too many people trying to show off how technically smart they are and just come off as obnoxious dweebs
I don’t know why people think that this behavior would ever be restricted to Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.?
There’s one common element in all these systems…
Just remove the humans and the problem disappears
I’ve seen enough AI freak outs to know that’s not true.
My new preferred social media is just me talking to ChatGPT
Joke’s on you, it’s just me on the other end you’re talking to.
And who do you think trained him? Data from the same people you dislike.
It’s becoming more and more noticeable and it’s making me sad.
The thing is, there’s nothing wrong with sharing knowledge or pointing out best practices. What sucks is people replying JUST to point out the flaws and then gloat, without even fully comprehending what happened in the article. But this behavior has been around way longer than reddit.
I feel it’s the same kind of people who complain regarding the same questions popping up at a forum often. I don’t get why they can’t just ignore them? Sure you could maybe find the answer by googling but sometimes you want to interact with others. Plus you might learn things you didn’t know you should also have asked.
My feeling is that Stackexchange is the place that has taken this the furthest with the result that new people can neither ask any questions nor get any points to get more rights on the site.
Yes, More opinions always lead to better decisions
It think it has always been there, it’s part of the internet and tech culture. Lemmy is not going to magically change that. We can try to make it better by writing good contributions and supporting those who do.
Downvote those dweebs
Lemmy guess… this is your 2nd go with a social media platform?
Lemmy sit you down on my knee son and let grandpa here explain how social media worked in his old times of facebook just like I sat on my grandpappys knee and he explained to me the days of AIM.
/s
Lemmy stop you right there—
And what’s most important is you putting smart people down to make yourself feel superior to them
You’ve been putting people down everywhere, quite hypocritical of you
How else are they supposed to show off how much smarter they are than those grubby redditors?
This is one the best uses of irony (probably unintentional or trolling) I’ve ever seen. Thanks
They sure are, bro. They sure are
I didn’t believe you but yeeeeeesh. Lots of self righteous penises ITT. If people buy an expensive hard drive, it should work. Not everyone knows everything there is to know about data storage, have a little grace people
What, you don’t do RAID-6 and carry around 5 external USB drives to move your data between locations? It’s just so convenient. 🤣
Seriously, I don’t get the raid comments at all.
Of course I don’t carry 5 external drives with me all the time, that would be ridiculous.
I carry the whole HBA.
Every1s doing it
Lol this place is half a circle jerk of people who think they’re certified geniuses for rejecting mainstream technology, tech hipsters. There was a thread about Google’s “safe browsing” thing and most of the comments were just "iMaGiNe UsInG gOoGle!!*
My only counter argument is that the verge article should also have stuck to the failures/defect, and either not mentioned their own dataloss, or at least mention possible mitigation strategies. I understand not everyone can do proper backups, but the verge can, and they should lead by example.
As for a comment on the actual drive defect, this is probably one of those cases where you want to insist on a refund. If the problem is as widespread as claimed, then getting a new defective drive doesn’t really help. WD/sandisk should just be recalling and refunding all devices. It’s odd that tech stuff never seems to have recalls in the same way that cars do? They seem to just rely on individual RMAs.
Aren’t usually recalls mostly for cases where it would cause personal injuries and as such the damages to the company are far bigger than not doing the recall.
Yeah it’s probably a risk/damages calculation. But imagine if WD had simply recalled all affected devices. Might mitigate some of the PR damage?
irrelevant to the point of the article
What are you talking about? Of course it’s relevant.
Hard drives are unreliable, they always have been and they probably always will be.
I’ve personally had three drives fail in the last 12 months - two HDDs and one SSD. And both of those were internal hard drives either in a data center or at least on a desk in a properly climate controlled office. All three of them were from far more reputable manufacturers than WD. I suspect none of those failures were the actual disk by the way pretty sure they were all chipset or firmware failures.
Your solution doesn’t have to be RAID, but it has to be something better than “I’ll just keep this file on a single drive”.
WD should absolutely do better - but at the same time even if they did do better it still wouldn’t be good enough. There shouldn’t be any data loss when (not if) a drive fails.
Stop focusing on the title. The lost data isn’t the point. The defect is the point.
there are 2 discussions happening: 1 about the product the article is talking about, and another about the tangentially related topic of disk failure in general
i see no problem here… or are we only allowed to discuss the specific points the article mentions now and absolutely under no circumstances are we allowed to have discussions about anything else…?
Second paragraph of the article: “My colleague Vjeran just lost 3TB of video”.
It’s not just the title, the entire article is about data loss. To be honest what really bothers me about the article is the whole thing points fingers at WD for making a mistake, while conveniently ignoring that fact that a Verge employee also made a mistake and I’d argue a worse one by failing to backup their data.
If the article was about “it’s annoying to have to wait for a replacement drive to be sent” then I’d be right on board. But that’s not what the article is about.
No… the company trying to hide the fact that their product is defective is the point here. Lost data or not, people are paying for a product that’s defective. End of story.
Why is your comment with so many upvotes but I still had to scroll down to find it. Everything above is kinda morbid. Im glad I scrolled enough, was worried a bit 🤣
Showing off my superior intellect is always relevant!
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Thank you for saying this
Then the article title should be less click bait termed and properly address that there’s a major firmware fault in the drives.
Journalism is lost on generating clicks and user turmoil rather than servicing the public in any way.
The article does exactly that.
Or read the article instead of just the headline.
I read the article, it’s also shit and fails to properly talk about the issue instead of ranting about data loss.
Or maybe people should actually read articles first instead of commenting based off just reading the “click bait“ headline?
are we not allowed to comment on the meta of the article as well as the substance of the article? i guess we need to stop complaining about paywalls and excessive inline ads too then
Yeah, because that’s exactly what I said, clearly. 🙄
Did you read the article? Because as far as I can see it fails to actually say shit about the problem. From just this article I can see why people are blaming the author for not having redundancy.
The Arstechnica articles however do actually say what’s going on, so yeah this appears to be a real issue with these drives disconnecting.
Yes.
But never miss an opportunity to pleasure yourself in public I guess?
I mean I wasn’t really in the mood but I’ll rub one out just for you
This is exactly why I invested 250x the cost of one SSD into my raid setup. It’s 100 SSD’s in raid1 in a huge rack which slides vertically on 4 guide poles.
I sit under the contraption and lean forward as far as I can, before lowering it onto my back. This method allows me to suck my own cock with ease, so that I don’t need to fellate myself on public forums
so that I don’t need to fellate myself on public forums
But you still do anyway, because you like the way it feels
But he doesn’t HAVE TO
No. He doesn’t NEED to.
Big difference. He can. And he probably also has to, but he just doesn’t NEED to.
I hope you’re getting off on redundancy and not a backup. Because RAID.is.not.a.backup.
(I can even gargle my balls)
Raid doesnt even protect against bit rot either. It doesn’t matter how many disks you write to even in a raid one array you are still vulnerable. Unless you have a high end raid card that does block level checksuming your raid array will not go back and verify previously written to data is still correct. If it does have checksuming it still isn’t smart enough to know which drive is the is correct and will lock the array in the best case.
ZFS pools do checksumming, snapshotting, etc.
As well as BTRFS and ReFS
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Someone didn’t read the story. This is about a known firmware fault that the company is doing its best not to keep quiet. Don’t help them in that work
They should’ve made a better headline
They included a large number of words after the headline that expound on the topic.
This concept is revolutionary! What should we call this new form of information delivery?
Yeah but the headline should let me know what the story is and make me interested. Not make me think the author is complaining that their SSD died.
I don’t care about that. I don’t want to read an article about that.
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Fuck nuance!
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There is absolutely nothing to say that the author didn’t have it backed up. He still lost 3TB of files from a new drive which was a replacement sent by the company, with a known fault supposedly fixed.
“Herp derp he should have backed up” is not the takeaway here”
Still, if SSDs fail repeatedly, something’s not right. That’s the point of the article
So because backups exist, everyone should be okay with buying bad hardware?
I know you’re not actually saying that, but countering “this is a known firmware fault” with a reminder that backups should be done sure makes it look like you’re saying that. There’s still value in making sure consumers’ money goes to products that last.
i think it’s the “we just lost 3TB of data” part… either the headline is hyperbole, in which case screw the clickbaint… or they lost 3TB of data which is always a good time to remind people that cheap NAND flash is cheap NAND flash
Single point of failure… surprised pikachu?
The use case for these drives is always a single point of failure. It’s camera footage out in the field. You have to get it home before you have proper storage.
Do you have a dashcam for your vehicle? Do you have backups before you get the footage home?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
This isn’t a drive he purchased many months or years ago — it’s the supposedly safe replacement that Western Digital recently sent after his original wiped his data all by itself.
SanDisk issued a firmware fix for a variety of drives in late May, shortly after our story.
But data recovery services can be expensive, and Western Digital never offered Vjeran any the first time it left him out to dry.
Honestly, it feels like WD has been trying to sweep this under the rug while it tries to offload its remaining inventory at a deep discount — they’re still 66 percent off at Amazon, for example.
Unfortunately, the broken state of the internet means Western Digital doesn’t have to work very hard to keep selling these drives.
I’d also like to say shame on CNET, Cult of Mac and G/O Media’s The Inventory for writing deal posts about this drive that don’t warn their readers at all.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Good bot.
“I have a defective drive, therefore all drives are defective”
Storage can fail at any time, that’s why important data should be backed up.
Dunno what more to expect from the Verge. Have they tried putting thermal paste on it?
Are you willing to accept an article from Ars Technica? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/sandisk-extreme-ssds-keep-abruptly-failing-firmware-fix-for-only-some-promised/
Do you think it’s not newsworthy if a manufacturer sells drives with a history of failures, releases a firmware update they claim will fix the issue, sends a replacement drive that also fails, and continues to sell the drives at a deep discount?
It’s definitely newsworthy, and the ars article is at least a bit more balanced. My main issue is the “I trusted my data to a single USB device, and was then furious when it died” clickbait. These journalists should know better than to store critical data in a single place.
If you can’t RMA the drives then that is a bigger problem, but that comes down to the consumer protection laws you have in your country.
These journalists should know better than to store critical data in a single place.
This again. Kindly point out to me where in the article they say they do not have another copy of that data. This is not an article about backup strategies, it is about repeated hardware failure and a known issue that is not being addressed by its manufacturer while selling affected drives at discount price.
My colleague Vjeran just lost 3TB of video we’d shot for The Verge because the drive is no longer readable.
If they have a backup they wouldn’t have lost anything. Data is only lost when you no long have access to the last copy.
The article should have just kept to the repeated hardware failure, and not waffled on about the lost data.
Edit: Did a bit more research, and it turns out these drives are sometimes used as the primary storage for video cameras. In that case there really is no option for backup, so definitely a case where disk failures can be catastrophic.
Thanks for the edit, I was not aware of that either.
OP should have posted this one, not that The Verge crap.
Did like none of y’all read the article?
We truly are on a Reddit clone.
They don’t send their best…
I did read it, and that was the point that jumped out at me as worth commenting on.
The rest of the WD RMA fuckery wasn’t really that unexpected, although definitely disappointing. If the article had focused on that I wouldn’t even have commented.
I have since found out that these drives are used as the storage for some video cameras, which is definitely a use case where backups are not feasible, and maybe that is what happened to the Verge.
But in all other uses, we should strive to have backups for our data, and given most people don’t backup correctly (myself included) it’s always worth having a reminder of the that… And to be clear, I’m not saying you need to have RAID99 zfs, even a second disk with a manual copy could save a ton of heartache and stress.
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Karma farming? If you say so, don’t think it worked. And I’ve given everyone ample opportunity to downvote me as penance.
I am just not happy with the way that article was written, and I expressed that (poorly, it seems). The Verge cheap shot at the end was maybe a bit mean, but hey, not all jokes land, my bad.
Anyway, seems like at the worst this discussion has brought a lot of attention to WDs product issues, and some light awareness of the importance of backups, so hopefully some good came from it.
In the article they point out their first drive failed and sandisk replaced it. Now the replacement is dying in the same way. And the drive just so happens to be on clearance now, as if they’re trying to clear out stock.
Also, it’s an SSD, so it’s not a mechanical failure.
SSDs can fail at random as well. Often with less warning. It’s definitely newsworthy that there are lots of these failures, but the “We lost 3tb of data” angle is bullshit. The correct response to a USB drive dying should be “Bummer, RMA it, and get a copy from the NAS/cloud/resilient storage”
In 2 months though?
The fact that it was a known issue, should have clued them in that maybe it should be used for memes, NFTs, and other crap that means absolutely nothing in the real world.
Aside from design defects, most items havr a bathtub curve for reliability. Stuff either fails very early on, or very late.
These drives are obviously defective. But USB harddrives in general should be used for copying data from point A to B, or storing secondary/tertiary copies of data. But definitely not long term storage of valuable data.
Agreed, all my external drives are backups of music, ebooks, and porn.
It’s not bullshit. The Verge is a consumer website. It’s absolutely relevant to inform consumers of a drive during twice and a company perhaps trying to cover up a defect in this way. The rest of us don’t care about what the verge does with their data, we care if it happens to us if we buy the product. I don’t care if I have a backup, I don’t want to buy an unreliable product.
Properly informing consumers should also involve reminding them that regardless of how “reliable” a drive is, failures can and will happen. And while these drives may be worse, a backup strategy is really the only way to be sure your data is actually safe.
I am not annoyed about the article existing, it absolutely should exist. And you should keep its message in mind when buying a drive. But you should also keep in mind the value of your data, that all drives will fail one way or another, and at least consider some form of backup.
Yes, we get it.
Don’t blame the victim here; concentrator on the company being shitty and recommend the victim use backups so they don’t get screwed in the future.
I get what you’re saying, but this was about the RMA replacement also failing.
Yeah, that’s bad, but maybe not surprising either. At that point insist on a refund (consumer protection laws are important) and go buy something else.
But definitely don’t put 3tb of critical unbackedup data on it and hope for the best.
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So they just had this one drive fail and they decided to make a big news article about it? Hardware fails sometimes. Just RMA the thing and shut the fuck up about it. Go build a gaming PC.
Did you read the article? Two drives, not one. In 3 months. By the same company. Who is aware of a problem, is trying to hide it, and pushed a firmware update that did not work. Also this second drive was a “safer” replacement the company sent the guy after the first one failed. I say an article about the whole situation is fully warranted
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Ragebait articles generate a lot of clicks ig.
Dude, I think you’re way too into the tech space if you think a website publishing an article about some bad ssds can be misconstrued as rage bait.
“I put 3TB of irreplaceable data on a single drive, and want to blame anyone but myself for my data loss”
Go away with this garbage.
I personally have a NAS with 12TB striped over 3 drives, I sure wouldn’t blame WD if one drive failed and I lost everything.
E: this whole comment section is why tech illiterate people shouldn’t really comment on hardware failures like this. The only fact that is know is that the verge faced 2 drive failures and lost 3TB of data due to a lack of safe data storage practices. If they were tech literate they wouldn’t have lost any data.
The verge did not confirm the mode of failure, and therefore the second failure could’ve been completely unrelated to the firmware issue. Nobody knows anything, other than the verge needs to educate themselves on how to properly store irreplaceable data.
The claim here seems to be that the product has an unusual failure rate, the manufacturer has acknowledged the original problem and released a fix, and it does not appear to be fixed. I don’t read it as a sob story about some reporter’s lost data.
Given the verges track record on tech reporting, i wouldn’t put faith in their journalistic integrity of a hit piece unless they show a bit more than “look, i lost a drive after they said they fixed the issue. They’re lying!”
Either you have an axe to grind or don’t really follow The Verge. What “track record” are you talking about here?
They have a history of tech misreporting. It’s not new news.
When you get a bunch of tech illiterate people to write tech articles, you get a bunch of garbage reporting. Including this. They haven’t back up their claims. No actual analysis of the failure point of the drives. They don’t show any proof that their 2 drive failures are even related other than they’re the same drive model. And even then, they didn’t include the exact sku
They have a history of tech misreporting. It’s not new news.
This does not add anything to the discussion. They had that infamous PC build video (for which they apologized and which they retracted) but that’s the only thing I can remember in the years I’ve been following them.
Also, providing a detailed technical analysis was not the scope of the article. Maybe you don’t follow them very much, but they usually don’t do this kind of things. They mostly cover internet culture, how technology impacts society, etc., because that’s their scope. This does not mean the editors are tech illiterate. The point of the article was to say that WD drives fail a lot; some publications are reporting that while some others don’t say anything; and the company is ignoring the problem.
I agree that the tone of the article is pretty butt-hurt and whiny, but that’s a problem of style and not of substance
Ooh ooooh look at me everybody I’m so much smarter than this IDIOT that expected the devices he PAID FOR to work as advertised and the company to be honest and straightforward with firmware issues and updates
I run this better system than NORMIES and even if it fails (because I’m an idiot) I DONT CARE ABOUT THE DATA on them because iT DiDn’T mATteR tO Me iN tHe fIrSt PlAcE.
PS For people wondering about the second paragraph, check this guy’s other comments in this thread.
Hence why RAID5 is so popular!
Correct. My next build will be redundant but given that my truenas pool is only storing movies, shows, music and porn, I don’t much care if I lose the contents due to a drive failure
Let’s see you bring your raid NAS on an out of country video shoot.Edit: Misread the comment. My reply isn’t addressing the actual point he made.
God you guys are all dense.
When did I say a NAS was the correct solution here? I’m just pointing out that I’m not absolved from poor data storage practices. But that I’m only doing it becauss I don’t care about the data.
The verge should know better, and including anything about their lost data in this shows they have no journalistic integrity. Reports the news, with proof that WD didn’t fix the issue. Don’t report that you suck at training your employees.
I get your point now. It really does sound like you were suggesting that they should’ve used a NAS instead at first read. Maybe a clearer paragraph structure would’ve helped you get your point across easier.
These drives have a very different use case than a rack mount NAS. They’re portable ruggedized devices for field use, like dumping content from your camera so you can keep shooting. Two would be better but it sounds like a known flaw that is causing random, frequent losses.
God you guys are all dense.
When did I say a NAS was the correct solution here? I’m just pointing out that I’m not absolved from poor data storage practices. But that I’m only doing it becauss I don’t care about the data.
The verge should know better, and including anything about their lost data in this shows they have no journalistic integrity. They simply want to pull your heartstrings for a hit piece with no actual proof. Reports the news, with proof that WD didn’t fix the issue. Don’t report that you suck at training your employees.
I hope you are using a UPS or some form of offline storage if you really can’t afford to loose your data.
I said I couldn’t care about the data, which is the only reason why I’m running a striped pool
redundancy is key
redundancy is key
redundancy is key
Even more redundancy
LOL
Yes, actually.
I do have multiple redundancy set up , but I’ve had many a sandisk drive fail, and a few wd my passports too. Now, the WDs were refurbs that I throw media on for the home network, or plugging into my shield, or like that. So I am never surprised when they just don’t work one day.
But the sandisk were brand new, and failed within weeks. It made me give up on the brand entirely. I just don’t like having to deal with my backups failing at that kind of rate. They are good about replacing them, but damn. I think I did two swaps on the one drive, three on another, and then just demanded a refund from the third. The one I use on my dad’s computer was the triple fail, and we finally got one that’s stayed working for a while now.
The other died after six months and I just trashed it and gave up.
I’ve also had horrible experiences with sandisk sd cards. They could be fakes, what with having bought them via amazon though.
Can’t trust Amazon with shit nowadays. What’s the point of sales if you get fake shit in the first place? I mean, Amazon is sleazy even without the common-binning but for a while they were good with their online shopping.
Also, what data storage solutions do you use now? I’m considering just encrypting my stuff and uploading them to some paid cloud service - atleast then someone else smarter than me is responsible for making sure it’s safe and accessible.
I encrypt anything important and use Google for offsite cloud because I, luckily, only have text and a few gigabytes of images that I want the extra step of encryption for.
Everything else, media and such that’s hard to replace but not important gets put on a drive and swapped out monthly to my sister’s house, and my best friend’s house.
Here, there’s a drive on each PC with that stuff, plus whatever is on the individual PC that gets moved to those drives. I’d have to go look for which is where though. But that’s five copies that I update from my main PC as I get new stuff, so they get moved around a good bit. And there’s a backup that is held as a spare.
But, all my files for the stuff I write are also synced to Dropbox and gdrive hourly when I’m writing, and again at the end of a session. During each session, its autosaved every five minutes because I’m a tad lazy and don’t like rewriting things I just wrote because there’s a power issue out here in the boonies. UPS might be an option, but I don’t always write on the same thing.
I don’t like Google any more, and don’t trust any of the “cloud” services as far as I can spit, but they are stable. I’ve never lost anything from the major services, and the free tiers are enough for my needs of important stuff.
I’ve been telling people for years that the entire 21st century is at risk of being a lost century. Even personally I can’t guarantee my data will be with me 20 years from now even though I back it up. If you care about a photo or document, print it and throw it it a box. As I get older I find more of an obsession with physical media from a preservation point of view. Because I know my books and pictures will be around 50 years from now. Digital files not so much.
I used to think this, but now, less so.
I agree with you in general, as most people don’t use physical media. However, those of us that do, are probably pretty secure in our legacy.
I have digital files that have been with me for over a quarter of a century, first through repeated copies to new media formats, then to more sophisticated backup systems. In the past few years, I’ve been alternating backing up to cloud services and then to local USB disks; the backup program is a statically compiled, monolithic program with few dependencies. Recently, I found a solution to the encrypted restore by survivors. I even have a README with instructions.
I’m secure in the knowledge that my 3TB of painstakingly curated collection of foot porn will be available to future researchers, for the betterment of mankind.
Thank you for your service !
We’re in the presence of greatness 🫡
Redundancy. I have 4 drives and the older two drives are always a backup of music and media. I can lose all the save games and softwares since they’ll be outdated anyways but memories need to be preserved.
The kind of media I don’t have backup of is from my Handycam tapes since they no longer make the software and I don’t know how to digitize them in any other way.
The kind of media I don’t have backup of is from my Handycam tapes since they no longer make the software and I don’t know how to digitize them in any other way.
Do this if desperate, but see below first:
Magnetic tape cassettes? Are they standard? Then just stick them in an audio player and record the signal— Or actually, they’re probably 8mm, or DV, or something— So then rip the reader head out of an audio player, scroll through the tape at a constant rate, and digitize that signal (for as many tracks as needed). Don’t do anything silly, like using too much force or sticking too strong a magnet next to them, of course. As long as you’ve got the signal, you can worry about decoding it later if you lose the originals— Get some nerdy college student to figure it out, or wait for someone else with the same problem to post their GIT repository.Easier: Check if the Internet Archive has a copy of the software. It looks like they have quite a few Sony Handycam CDROMs. Maybe you’ll find a compatible model. Run it on an old Windows VM or computer if you need. “No longer make the software” sounds odd; Software like that is made once and then distributed.
(Or: Presumably you can still watch the tapes? Does the camera not have video output that you pass through some sort of capture box? — Though that of course would be lossy.)
Or: Wikipedia suggests the “Handycam” brand was used for multiple format standards, like “Video8” or “Hi8” or whatever. So just search Nile.com (or your personal favourite exploitation-powered online storefront) for “NameOfFormat Digitizer”, and wait for the order to to arrive. Here’s a couple articles from the first search results: IndieWire, VHSConverters. Here’s a machine that supports a couple formats, and has licensed a very reputable brand KodakPhotoPlus. And here’s a service that will apparently do it for you: LegacyBox. — Pricey, maybe, but how much time and money are you already spending, and how much are the tapes worth to you?
Thanks, i think the archive + vm would work. What I meant was there’s no modern software that supports current gen OS.
I’m not in the US so legacy box is out, thanks for sharing. I finally found a way
I’ve been telling people for years that the entire 21st century is at risk of being a lost century. Even personally I can’t guarantee my data will be with me 20 years from now even though I back it up. If you care about a photo or document, print it and throw it it a box. As I get older I find more of an obsession with physical media from a preservation point of view. Because I know my books and pictures will be around 50 years from now. Digital files not so much.
LOCKSS and KISS, though. Flash chips don’t last forever but are pretty durable, and so are optical media as long as they’re the right material. SSDs decay and HDDs fail, but for magnetic platter media even if the head or motor crashes there’s always the old magnetic microscope in a pinch. USB’s not going anywhere, and if you have four or five copies that you don’t completely neglect and don’t store in the same physical place, presumably you’ll have the chance to notice and take corrective measures if any of them start failing or are at risk.
I don’t actually know that an individual book or picture will still be around in 50 years; Fire, flooding, insects, acidic paper, low-quality ink maybe— Digital stuff’s fragile, but so is physical stuff. Stick it in the attic, and the heat’ll speed up any chemical reactions and probably make it cozier for insects; Stick it in the basement, and the condensation will get you mildew and rot. By contrast, having a flash drive accidentally survive a trip through a washer and dryer is a pretty common occurrence, and I’ve yet to lose a drive even with that level of negligence. Material compatibility’s one of the very most basic parts of a set of very precise manufacturing techniques, tin whiskers seem pretty rare these days, the really scarily insidious stuff like hydrogen embrittlement is super improbable, and most biological forms of decay haven’t adapted to eating cured epoxy and monocrystalline silicon yet.
At least I sorta know how a flash cell or hard drive platter is meant to be structured; Who knows what weird organic reactions and unstable or slowly diffusing molecules are happening in the pile of chemical pigments on a sheet of likely-acidic bleached cellulose and cheap ink or toner, and whether it will still be legible to human eyes in however many years? Plus, a printed photo or document starts fading the very instant it’s created, and it gets a little worse every time you touch it with sweaty human hands or look at it while exhaling moist human breath and corrosive enzymatic saliva droplets under a white LED lamp or G-type star shooting out ionizing UV rays. Digital failures tend to be catastrophic, but at least up until the moment it fails, you can make sure that it is the exact same picture or text— And you can make many, many copies very cheaply, all of them very physically durable compared to paper, and know that they are all the exact same picture and text.
That said, I absolutely agree with your overall assessment that most of the information in the early 21st century, including most of the public Internet/WWW, most likely either will be or already is… Maybe not technically lost, per se, given how much caching and saving happens on private clients, but certainly rendered inaccessible.
Ideally I’d really love to see a return of microfiche, actually, using modern polymers and metallization. I’ve been meaning to look into that for a while now. At a reasonable scale for optical viewing, you could fit… much, much more content than you might expect, and do it several times over, in an entirely reasonable number of pages. Your comment actually spurred me to finally think of a practical way of printing that— for years before, I’d been trying to idly figure out a process based on photomasks and nanoparticles suspended in resin, which had always felt like a very messy and tricky idea, but I just thought of another idea– So thanks for providing some inspiration there.
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This is a hot take
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PCM, ASCII, and straight RGBA bitmap encodings aren’t going anywhere. By extension, derived formats like WAV, UTF-8, and word processor files and webpage HTML are mostly fine too. The formats are structurally simple enough that even if the associated file extensions were somehow to be forgotten, all you’d need to do to invent them again is hand the file to a bored nerd over the weekend.
I think you kinda got the BBC and NASA problems backwards. The BBC’s had a couple of prominent incidents where digital “preservation” that was supposed to be eternal couldn’t even be opened anymore after a couple of years, like their Domesday Book/Project application thingy. They’ve also lost a bunch of old shows, like early Dr. Who episodes, I think. NASA didn’t just forget how to read the Apollo tapes; they overwrote them to reuse the tapes, as was their standard practice at the time. The original signal and tapes were very HD (or analog), but most of the videos we have today are from the TV camera that they pointed at their own TV screen last-minute when they realized they didn’t have an adapter for broadcast— The equivalent of a grainy cell phone photo of a screenshot, basically.
The BBC and NASA incidents happened in an era before computers were a ubiquitous commodity product. So, everyone and their cat was basically inventing their own obscure single-implemention proprietary file formats at that time. Nowadays we have established technical standards, as well as formats that have already sorta stood the test of time based on their utility and simplicity— and millions of people who already know how to read them— so that particular vector for bitrot isn’t really as much of an issue anymore.
…That said, I think I sorta missed your point. What you’re really saying is that stewardship of digital records is much trickier and riskier than stewardship of physical records— and that results in stuff being lost. And that is absolutely true.
There is a will but there aren’t enough people with enough brain power to actually do the steps needed. Should it endure? I don’t know, maybe the last few decades should be forgotten.
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Fair
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Crazy how a single event sometimes reminds people of bigger problems, huh?
Digital media, where we store basically everything we care about, is hugely, hugely volatile, unreliable, and fragile. But you never notice it until you’re reminded of it, and then you really notice it. This story reminded people of it.
The reminder to stay grounded is probably also healthy, but I do think you’re missing the point of this comment thread.
Ugh, I literally just fucking bought this drive
I wonder if it’d be worth returning if you’re still in the window. I don’t know how common the issues are though. Maybe check out the Ars Technica article someone linked?
Well I bought it for mass media storage for an upcoming trip. So I’ll just see how it goes and consider options afterward
But then wouldn’t you lose the data from your trip in the experiment though?
Probably movie files he has saved on a computer somewhere so it’s safe
shuck it and put it into a new enclosure
I almost bought one because they were on huge sale at Amazon.
Yeah, I wouldn’t suggest buying the huge sales at amazon for ssd’s.
They probably pulled the bad drives back from merchant stock to avoid getting returns. Those frequently wind up on Amazon as huge sales.
Not always. Their prime day and Black Friday deals are usually pretty solid. I’ve gotten drives the last 2 prime days, and a black Friday 4 years ago, and they’ve lasted the couple years I’ve had them, and last years 2tb is fine in my PS5 so far.
I’d be wary of any sk hynix ones though. I can almost guarantee those are always ripped out of old builds, because that’s where all of mine have come from.
You’re probably fine, all drives have failures and I haven’t seen anything to indicate this is a widespread issue with the drive.
The manufacturer has acknowledged it’s an issue and has issued at least one patched firmware. This isn’t a “luck of the draw” or isolated issue.
So my serial number says I don’t need the patch. So hopefully I’m fine.
I was today years old when I learned places like TheVerge are filled with idiots who keep work on USB media, keep no backups, and act like it’s not their fault when something fails.
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Vox Media was the owner since the beginning. The founders of The Verge went to the owner of SB Nations after leaving Engadget. It is part of Vox Media since the beginning.
They also think it’s newsworthy when they experience one hardware failure. How nice to have a platform to shout your own personal grievances from.
Randomly disconnects = chance for data loss
Though the filesystem plays a role. I have a full metal body Sandisk USB stick that still overheats after a while and then disconnects (has a heatsink on top now) but ext4 handles that fine. I know that Fat32 has no journaling and NTFS is a tad bit sensible to disconnects. Don’t know about exfat.
My external SSD I put together with a “nice” enclosure started dropping to 5MB/s on any machine. I don’t trust most external SSDs anymore.
I DO trust my RPi case with built-in m.2 USB adapter thingy, as it’s running full speed in that thing, no issues with speed dropping.
I’d like to know more about this adapter thingy.
Oh it’s AMAZING. It’s an expensive case for the Raspberry Pi 4 models, called Argon. It’s 45USD or so. BUT! It CHANGES THE SHITTY MICRO HDMI PORTS INTO TWO REAL HDMI PORTS!
It also has a little slot for an m.2 SSD inside it, and a tiny USB connector to make it work with a Pi. You can super easily boot from SSD and use a microsd as extra storage. It’s like 10x faster than microSD, it’s wild.
I had bought a different case (that honestly I love) but when I read about this one, I fell in love. Only problem is it only takes SATA m.2 drives, which happened to be the kind in my shitty enclosure.
I did something similar and use these UGreen enclosures with an M.2 on each RPi in my cluster. You can easily use these as portable media with whatever SSD you want.
Sorry, on mobile and have no idea how to strip the Amazon link properly. This is the older model I got.
You can buy straight from them as well. Never had an issue with any of their products. https://www.ugreen.com/collections/hubs-docks/products/ugreen-m-2-nvme-sata-ssd-enclosure-reader?variant=39915665129534
It’s my biggest peeve with owning this SSD. I can leave it over a weekend and come back to, no lie, 50+ disconnect notifications from MacOS. Shoddy software to say the least…
Ok, that’s far too much.
I use an Asus enclosure and put in a WD ssd. The heat dissipation is better than the sandisk model and it stays connected pretty much always except during travels
Eh, wait, so it’s heath related? Defective firmware causing overheating or too low limits?
Haven’t had that issue, but definitely design related. Mine is a Asus rog enclosure which has better heatsink than sandisk
If the data doesn’t matter: Put it on one drive.
If losing the data would cost you minor downtime: Put it on two drives (or storage arrays of some sort) in two locations.
If losing the data would cause major downtime: Put it on three drives (or storage arrays of some sort) in two or three locations.
If losing the data would cause life-disrupting issues for multiple people: Put it on as many drives as possible/feasible (or storage arrays of some sort) in enough locations that you can sleep well at night.
Edit: weird thing to get a bunch of downvotes, but you do what you want with your data
This is pretty good advice. I don’t get why the downvotes.
Yep, this is the way.
Just throwing this out there for anyone shopping for storage drives. BackBlaze does a pretty good regular writeup on the drives they use and how they perform, how reliable they are, etc. It’s very informative and a fun read (if you’re into nerdy stuff).
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q2-2023/
