“Engineered obsolescence” is an accusation that gets thrown at tech hardware a lot. And it’s often misapplied: Lithium-ion batteries really do wear down, especially when constantly recharged, and old software can’t keep running new applications forever. But in the case of some Western Digital hard drives, which appear to be sending out “replace me!” warnings after an arbitrary time limit even in the absence of any actual hardware faults, it might be entirely justified.
Ars Technica reported that this was the case when WD drives were installed in Synology network connected storage (NAS). After running continuously for three years — which is fairly unremarkable for hard drives designed specifically for server storage — the analytics software pre-loaded in the Western Digital drives alert Synology’s DiskStation Manager interface. What alerts it? That the drive has been running for three years, and that’s all. The recommended action is to replace the drive…and it’s surely coincidental that this happens shortly after the three calendar years of some drives’ standard manufacturer warranty.
While the warnings can occur in absence of any other, genuine problems with a hard drive, they’re causing headaches for Synology users. Banked drives in a NAS with an active alert can’t be used to repair or expand a pool of storage from another source. So users either have to replace the drive in question — which, again, may have no error or malfunction aside from the fact that its active hours count has ticked over that three years mark — or disable the drive’s analytic system, possibly missing out on genuine alerts in the future.
And “ticked” is an accurate way to describe the reaction of Synology users all over the internet. On Reddit, YouTube, and support pages, NAS users have poured out their anger on Western Digital, the affected products, and the WD Red Plus and Red Pro hard drives. The general accusation has been that the WD Device Analytics Software (WDDA) generates bogus alerts in order to encourage customers to replace perfectly functional hard drives.
Synology is caught in the middle for designing software that works with Western Digital’s warning system, in the possibly misplaced faith that it would only report genuine hardware errors. The NAS manufacturer encourages affected users to disable WDDA in Storage Manager. This will clear the warning, and restore the full repair and expansion capabilities.
This latest controversy is part of a long line of disputes in which users accuse manufacturers of trying artificially to shorten product life in order to sell more replacements. Printer ink cartridges often send an “empty” signal long before their reservoirs have fully run dry (a situation not helped by arbitrary DRM forcing you to buy manufacturer brands), and even Apple has been accused of slowing down older iPhones in order to juice sales. Google Chromebooks’ security updates are limited by arbitrary time periods, while Microsoft does everything it can to get users to switch to Windows 11. How much of this is truly malicious and how much is business as usual — and whether there’s actually a distinction between those two — is a matter for continual debate.