- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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The Verge is a hit or miss outfit for me. Sometimes they’re fine, but then you remember when they tried to build a PC and you wonder if they really actually know what they’re doing over there.
Apparently they gave that guy (who had never built a PC on camera before) like less than a week to put that video together. Should it have gone out? No, but it’s not the guy in the video’s fault. Source: https://youtu.be/QKzmYsySGFQ
Oh I’m not throwing shade at Stefan, but the entire organization. A product like that doesn’t happen because of one journalist, it happens because upper management constantly undervalues the time and effort it takes to put it together.
A week is plenty of time to do it right. It’s not like you’re asking someone who doesn’t know algebra to do a video teaching advanced calculus in a week.
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All the tech sites seem to run unlabeled advertising a lot of the time. I get lots of “save $2000 on this amazing Lenovo laptop” crap in my feeds. The Amazon Prime one sounds like it may be a paid ad too.
Feeder has a filter option that’s come in handy for getting rid of junk articles like that.
It’s basically just a really elaborate angry comment on a SanDisk SSD. Sucks that you lots your data, but it’s a single failure that could happen to basically any drive. Back up what you care about. Absolute waste of time ‘article.’
It’s two failures in a row on a drive that had a known firmware issue that had supposedly been fixed. Given the other reports floating around about this model it seems there could actually be a problem. But to know for sure we’d need statistics which we don’t have.
But to know for sure we’d need statistics which we don’t have.
Precisely my point.
NOTHING I have that is irreplaceable is on less than 2 drives nor are they ever connected at the same time. You’re just asking to lose files if you only save them on one drive.
Anything I have that is super important is just uploaded to a server with backups turned on. Becomes 100%, not my problem anymore.
Until the backups don’t work.
Untested backups can hold all sorts of surprises.
Sadly, testing backups is a lot of work and is rarely done.
Deja Dup has a nice feature in that every once in a while is spawns and verifies that the backup is retrievable
Retrievable is a start, at least.
Sorry, I should have said verified. it reads through the backup and checks data integrity/checksums etc. so you know it can be retrieved properly.
Testing a back isn’t that hard, I typically test backups through digital ocean. They worked great.
Not your problem… until the hosting provider publishes a press release about some recent fire or flooding in the data center that “only impacted less than 1% of our customers”… and you turn out to be among them.
For “super important” stuff, I keep closer to 10 copies spread around in different places. Normal stuff is 321, and everything else is temporary.
eh, I’ve never hit that issue but I also have a copy of everything locally.
I have. Both server and backup lost, and all I got was a complimentary 1 free month. Not a fun time uploading everything again from the single local copy.
Now something similar is going on with Google for Business, where they’ve switched from “unlimited storage” to “actually, $300/10TB/month”. Like that’s going to happen (there are $100/100TB/month bare metal out there), but now I have to decide what to delete, what to keep, and what to downgrade from 321, to “temporary” single copy.
So are you a bot or no? Your account is marked as a bot. 🤔
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Important for humans too… unfortunately we keep on making corrupted copies.
Himself and his invasion plans. Though I feel weird referring to it as ‘him’, I guess it’s his choice. AI rights.
A bot WOULD have good backup routines…
The article alludes to this problem, but Amazon has basically forfeited the consumer goodwill they used to have. It used to be that their reviews were trustworthy (and relatively hard to game), and ordering products “sold by Amazon” was a guarantee that there wouldn’t be counterfeits intermingled in. Plus they had a great return policy, even without physical presence in most places.
Now they don’t police fake reviews, and do a bad job of the “SEO” of which reviews are actually the most helpful, they’re susceptible to commingling of counterfeit goods (especially electronics and storage media), and their return policy has gotten worse.
It basically makes it so that they’re no longer a good retailer for electronics, and it’s worth going into a physical store to avoid doing business with them.
Or there’s the proper online tech stores as an alternative. With a smaller product base reviews and checks would work a lot better.
Enshittification. Applies to Amazon too.
First they attracted consumers. Then they attracted sellers. Now they’re exploiting both.
There is a reason why they got brick and mortar shops to close, while sellers with too good of a return policy are going under, and the search feature returns random numbers of items in a random order that have little to do with what you asked it for (the most egregious is “sort by price”, which suddenly makes the product count go down… but you go to camelcamelcamel, and for the same search it stays the same with actual sorting by price).
I get a lot of folks are correctly pointing out the need to back up data but isn’t that a little bit of victim blaming? This isn’t a situation where the guy had a 10 year old drive with all his photos and videos sitting around unbacked up. He had a new drive and it failed. Can we agree that brand new drives aren’t supposed to fail?
Can we agree that brand new drives aren’t supposed to fail?
No.
The typical failure rates, for pretty much all electronics, even mechanic stuff, form a “bathtub graph”: relatively many early failures, very few failures for a long time, with a final increasing number of failures tending to a 100%.
That’s why you’re supposed to have a “burn in” period for everything, before you can trust it within some probably (still make backups), and beware of it reaching end of life (make sure the backups actually work).
That’s absolutely true in the physical sense, but in the “commercial”/practical sense, most respectable companies’ QA process would shave off a large part of that first bathtub slope through testing and good quality practices. Not everything off of the assembly line is meant to make it into a boxed up product.
Apparently even respectable companies are finding out that it’s cheaper to skimp on QA and just ship a replacement item when a customer complains. Particularly when it’s small items that aren’t too expensive to ship, but some are doing it even with full blown HDDs.
In this case, I think we can remove what’s left of the benefit of the doubt from Western Digital (who owns SanDisk). They are as scammy/shady as I know a company to be.
Personally I’ve been boycotting them since 2016 after I couldn’t recover the data from an external drive, which WD encrypted without warning nor consent. A faulty component on the PCB (unrelated to the drive itself), combined with WD’s non standard practices (non SATA pins + mandated proprietary encryption) meant that I had to lose this drive and the data it contained so they could make a quick buck. I can’t trust a company with such ethics to store anything for me.
In 2020, they got themselves into another scandal. WD reds, which were advertised as pro/NAS storage, and sold at a premium, were found to behave like shingled drives (a technique that trades away some reliably and availability in exchange for extra storage density), exposing many users to heightened risk of critical failure (esp. during disks swaps). WD of course denied, and then again when confronted with evidence, up until the internet burst in flames. Again consumer hostile practices.
Here we have SSDs which have been reported for months, and by several reputable sources, to be having problems, which SanDisk even attempted to patch without success. And now, wouldn’t you think that they are trying to recall them all in order to protect consumers from likely data loss (like any responsible data storage provider would do)? Nope. They are currently trying to sell those at significant discount, as quickly as they can, hurting plenty of consumers in the process is less important than their short term financials.
As far as I can care, they can go to hell, bankruptcy is all they deserve, for the greater good.
Indeed. An old EE mentor told me once that most component aging takes place the first two weeks of operation. If it operates for two weeks, it will probably operate for a long, long time after that. When you’re burning in a piece of gear, it helps the testing process if you put it in a high temperature environment as well (within reason) to place more stress on the components.
The high temperature part is kind of a trap with SSDs: flash memory is easier to write (less likely to error out) at temperatures above 50C, so if you run a write heavy application at higher temperature, it’s less likely to fail than if it was kept colder.
Properly stress testing an SSD would be writing to it while cold (below 20C) and checking read errors while hot (above 60C).
For normal use you’d want the opposite: write hot, read cold.
They should at least try to recover the data. Maybe a data recovery program like spinrite would just do it. https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm .
Not running raid, not backing up, and not even trying the simplest recovery approaches is just sloppy and lazy. Do at least one of the three.
Like someone else said. Expect the biggest risk of failure when you buy it. Then like maybe 5 years out rising failure rates. Refreshing the disk pattern as it gets older can help too.
Extreme data loss!
And that’s why RAID is a good idea.
For availability, yes, but RAID is not a substitute for proper backup procedures. E.g. - offsite, cloud, or automated scheduled local backups, or even regular data integrity checks.
True, but it will protect you from a single drive failing like this.
I don’t think the drive actually failed. The article said that the files disappeared from the drive one-by-one, which sounds like a firmware bug to me.
You could theoretically have the same problem due to a buggy RAID controller or driver.
I don’t think the drive actually failed. The article said that the files disappeared from the drive one-by-one
It didn’t fail in the sense of reporting an I/O error, but it did fail in the sense that the bytes previously written to it can’t be read any more.
which sounds like a firmware bug to me.
Could be. SSD firmware is pretty notorious for data loss.
You could theoretically have the same problem due to a buggy RAID controller or driver.
Which is why I don’t trust hardware RAID controllers, only software RAID, preferably with per-block checksums so that the software RAID controller knows which copy is the good copy.
The author is using macOS, whose APFS file system has those features. Linux’s btrfs does too.
Raid 0 right?
RAID 1. Raid 0 stripes data between disks, meaning you get much faster I/O speeds but if one disk fails, you lose it all. RAID 1 is when you have 2 (or more) disks and the data is mirrored between both. So if one does, you’ve got a perfect copy of it on the other disk. RAID 0 = “striped”, RAID 1 = “mirrored”
In case anyone is in a similar situation, I can’t say enough good things about PhotoRec. It saved my ass more than once from hard drive recovery down to SD cards.
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
Yeah, yeah, it’s command line only, but once you get your stuff back it’s worth learning!
And it is not only command line. PhotoRec has a gui, only testdisk doesn’t
I second this. I luckily never needed it myself but I saved the stuff of a few people over the years and it’s not one of those annoying „free“ apps.
SSDs are nice and fast but if the data table goes bad, you have lost everything. At least with a HDD you can still pull files off if filesystem table goes bad. Also unplugged SSD in a hot location will lose data quite readily. Always keep them powered to keep the bits.
Did they really abbreviate “paragraph” to “graf”?
Journalistic jargon: hed, dek, lede, nut graf/nutgraf
Yes, but it’s standard journalist speak and predates this article by a long time.
“Lede” I’ve heard because of the common expression “burying the lede.” You’re telling me “graf” is standard language for published articles?
You’re telling me “graf” is standard language for published articles?
And its unabbreviated form, “nut graf.” Like, it’s a legit thing. I mean…wow. Nut graf.
What is a good portable HDD to get these days?
Or should I just get one of those little usb m2 cases.
Just get a portable m.2 case.
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(Extremely drunk)
I don’t remember any more.
(Fishes out a SanDisk Extreme SD 128GB card from the box)
Was this the one? I think this was the one.
The one that fucking failed.…fuck. I had more money than sense a few years ago.
This is one of the reasons why I prefer having a few smaller drives than one big one. Having a zillion terabytes of storage one one drive is great and all, but that’s a lot of stuff to potentially lose when something craps out. I’d sooner have a couple smaller ones so that if one hdd does shit the bed…err case? at least not everything’s gone.
that’s the neat thing if you’re shooting 4k or above 3TB IS a small drive
If you have a proper backup system in place that shouldn’t be a problem. Speaking of which I should do another round of backups…
My only big drive is just for games. I have two internal 1t drives one hdd and one SSD for storage on my computer and four external 512g drives as backup to those. It’s not the best solution, and it’s kind of clunky but I’d rather have something than lose everything to a bad drive.
That’s good to know. I almost thought of buying a couple (I always back up with pairs) to replace a couple of aging spinning disk portables.
Guess I will wait.
And the truism holds. If you only have one backup. you don’t have backups.
