Western Digital users have found that HDDs that use Western Digital Device Analytics (WDDA) are automatically flagged as “warning” in Synology DiskStation Manager after the number of on hours exceeds three years.
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WDDA is generic SMART monitoring and is similar to many other competing offerings such as the Seagate IronWolf. It provides the user with analytics, as well as information on actions that can be taken in a given situation.
Reports of the problem began to appear on forums dedicated to Synology devices, the official forums of Synology, as well as on Reddit, YouTube, and so on.
The “warning” flag that appears on HDDs that have been used for more than three years is accompanied by the following message: “The drive has accumulated a large number of hours of operation [during] its life. Please consider replacing the disk as soon as possible.” At the same time, in fact, there are no problems with such hard drives.
According to Synology’s documentation, this mark means “the system has detected problems or an increase in the number of bad sectors on the disk. Even if the drive is working fine, keep monitoring its health and the number of bad sectors.”
ArsTechnica says that now some users, including YouTuber SpaceRex, refuse to recommend Western Digital devices to other people. In May of this year, the mentioned YouTuber already expressed his outrage, explaining that three years is “just nothing” for a drive designed for NAS, and the frightening mark appears simply because the drive has worked for three years.
SpaceRex fears that such a warning could force many users to replace the drive prematurely. So, he said that one of his clients panicked when he saw a warning, and fearing the loss of business-critical data, he hurried to notice all his drives.
Also experts explain that, in general, WDDA provides redundant and SMART-based information, without being something really useful.
SpaceRex also notes that QNAP devices may soon support WDDA, so warnings may not only affect owners of Synology devices.
Other users have expressed concern that the “warning” mark can prevent them from noticing really serious problems with the hard drive. Moreover, the owner of such a disk is deprived of the opportunity to restore the pool if the disk received a warning.
The journalists discovered that Western Digital does not have a publicly available list of devices with WDDA support. However, Synology has a partial list that includes WD Red Pro, WD Red Plus, and WD Purple, which Western Digital advertises as video surveillance hardware, not NAS hardware.
A Synology spokesperson told the publication that the “warning” refers to “devices that support WDDA, including devices with model numbers ending in the range -13 to -21 that run DSM 7.0, DSM 7.1, and DSM 7.2.” However, WDDA has not been used in newer models since DS1522+ released in July 2022.
Interestingly, the three years mentioned above is the warranty period for some affected HDDs. But some affected drives, like the Red Pro, come with a five-year warranty.
Now that this dubious Western Digital practice is being widely discussed online, there are already suggestions on Reddit to disable WDDA over SSH. In turn, a Synology representative told reporters that if WDDA is enabled in DSM, you can disable it in Storage Manager and the warning will disappear.
SpaceRex, meanwhile, urges Synology engineers to abandon WDDA altogether, but this will require cooperation with Western Digital, and the company has not yet commented on the problem and user dissatisfaction.
