An unpleasant surprise for My Book Live owners

Posted Jun 30, 2021 7:21 UTC (Wed) by flussence (guest, #85566)
Parent article: An unpleasant surprise for My Book Live owners

WD has a hard-earned reputation for internal hard drives that last as long as the warranty says and not a nanosecond more, so I'm wholly unsurprised this is the response. I bet there's a whole iceberg of devices being actively exploited, from them and others.

Maybe we need a return to outright destructive bricking malware. IoT junk peddlers won't do a proper job of their products until indifference like this comes back to absolutely ruin them.

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An unpleasant surprise for My Book Live owners

Posted Jun 30, 2021 13:50 UTC (Wed) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link] (9 responses)

> WD has a hard-earned reputation for internal hard drives that last as long as the warranty says and not a nanosecond more

When it comes to hard drives, I wouldn't single out WD. *All* hard drive manufacturers have had product releases with appalling reliability. Check out the Backblaze reliability surveys for some chilling reading: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html

Maybe this electromechanical technology is just so difficult to get right that nobody has managed to do it. Or maybe all of these companies are incompetent and don't care.

I'm just extremely glad that these products have became irrelevant for end-users. To think how many people used to trust all their data to a single unreliable device without backups. In these situations, the warranty is almost irrelevant because the manufacturer wouldn't replace the data.

An unpleasant surprise for My Book Live owners

Posted Jun 30, 2021 14:26 UTC (Wed) by fenncruz (subscriber, #81417) [Link]

There also an issue with the value of what's stored on the drive. There are plenty of things around my house that breaks. But when they do I'm only out the cost of replacing the item. If a hard drive fails I need a new hard drive and hope my backups work or I'm having to pay for a very expensive drive recovery. Thus I'm going to be far less torrelant of a hard drive failure.

An unpleasant surprise for My Book Live owners

Posted Jun 30, 2021 14:30 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (6 responses)

> Maybe this electromechanical technology is just so difficult to get right that nobody has managed to do it. Or maybe all of these companies are incompetent and don't care.

Or maybe the companies got screwed over by politicians ...

A lot of modern electronics is of poor quality today because the manufacturers can no longer use lead solder. aiui, modern solder suffers unavoidably from "tin whiskers", which doesn't affect decent lead solder. And it only takes one whisker to cause serious damage.

Cheers,
Wol

An unpleasant surprise for My Book Live owners

Posted Jun 30, 2021 15:15 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (2 responses)

Well, lead is a considerable toxin to humans (and other biological life that we share this planet with) and given our propensity to just throwing everything into a hole (or the sea for that matter) and hoping it's OK for "long enough" that it's someone else's problem, I really wouldn't want it to build up in any amounts. Lead gasoline had upsides too for the mechanical functioning of ICEs, but that doesn't mean it's worth the cost of spewing lead-laced vapors into the air everywhere.

An unpleasant surprise for My Book Live owners

Posted Jul 13, 2021 21:10 UTC (Tue) by cypherpunks2 (guest, #152408) [Link] (1 responses)

Even though lead is bad for the environment, we're releasing more toxic substances due to the fact that landfills are piled high with electronics that failed due to tin whiskers. If we switched back to using lead, it would actually be a net benefit for the environment.

An unpleasant surprise for My Book Live owners

Posted Jul 14, 2021 9:02 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

Do we have actual data on how much WEEE is the result of tin whiskers from cheap lead-free solders as opposed to going to such disposal due to any of:

bad soldering; being plugged into a low-quality charger; the upgrade treadmill plus low prices; cheap knockoff components; poor impact resistance; liquid damage; fragile connectors that would cost more than the device's RRP to pay someone to replace; ...

I'm sure someone's trying to gather it, but I wouldn't know where to look.

An unpleasant surprise for My Book Live owners

Posted Jun 30, 2021 17:29 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

The decline in the quality of modern electronics has plenty of reasons that are very little to do with "most methods of mitigating Sn whiskers are more expensive and/or less convenient than adding Pb to your solder and hoping local regulations on the use of Pb and other toxic heavy metals remain lax".

An unpleasant surprise for My Book Live owners

Posted Jun 30, 2021 18:07 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (1 responses)

I doubt most hard drives that fail do so because of tin whiskers in the electronics. I bet most failures are in the mechanical or electromechanical components, or caused by a power surge.

An unpleasant surprise for My Book Live owners

Posted Jun 30, 2021 18:25 UTC (Wed) by willy (subscriber, #9762) [Link]

A surprisingly large number of hard drive failures 20 years ago were firmware. (And the RMA could have been avoided by unplugging the power). I imagine that percentage has only increased since.

An unpleasant surprise for My Book Live owners

Posted Jul 5, 2021 0:26 UTC (Mon) by plugwash (subscriber, #29694) [Link]

> Maybe this electromechanical technology is just so difficult to get right that nobody has managed to do it. Or maybe all of these companies are incompetent and don't care.

Companies are constantly pushing the limits of the underlying tech to one-up each other on capacity/cost. So they end up with a delicate balance, push too hard and they get the bad PR from releasing a lemon, don't push hard enough and their products are uncompetitive.