Western Digital Faces Backlash for Age-Shaming Hard Drives.
Western Digital's NAS hard drives using Western Digital Device Analytics (WDDA) are automatically given a warning label in Synology's DiskStation Manager (DSM) after three years of use, causing panic and anger among customers who accuse the company of age-shaming drives to push people to buy new HDDs prematurely. The warning labels affect devices supporting WDDA, including models with model numbers ending in -13 to -21 that are operating on DSM 7.0, DSM 7.1, and DSM 7.2. Western Digital already had a steep climb to win back NAS customers' trust after shipping NAS drives with SMR instead of CMR.