But should I care? It has a 5 year warranty and redundancy. By that time a larger disk will be required to store the blocks.
People should focus on backups rather than brands.
Discussion
brands have a specific set of manufacturing facilities and plants, in general, ok sometimes that overlaps but not often with long established brands do they use competitors, usually due to contractual obligations
a backup is worthless if it is stored on a device with poor quality control as the worse the QA standard, the more likely that when you come to rely on it, it's not working
fortunately, for the most part flash storage doesn't become unreadable when it fails, but spinning disks can gum up due to bad lubricants that have aged and the disk doesn't spin, or the media craps out leading to a higher error rate than the drive's FEC setup (which is not reed solomon like it is on ISO formated storage btw, also i think tape backups use RS FEC)
usually there is a cost premium associated with the level of QA that a manufacturer requires of their devices, and this QA level usually entails stress testing a certain percentage of each production batch to establish a benchmark for the batch lifespan estimate and thus insuring the warranties are not likely to void very often until after the devices fail
this is why it's worth spending a little extra on a better quality device with a lower return rate because it likely means they sacrifice a larger percentage of production to quality assurance and that warranty period has more relation to reality than their budget for covering this cost
long warranty periods don't necessarily mean that the devices are likely to last longer, just that the sales volume enables them to cover a higher failure rate
i don't know what WD's QA benchmarks are these days but me and semisol both avoid this brand because in the days of spinning disks, they were notorious for failing before the warranty was out, or not long after it, whereas other devices, sometimes even with shorter warranties, would last far longer in practise.
this is a practise known as "loss leading" in the industry and tends to be used by manufacturers that are aiming at cheapskate users like you
you can risk your data with it but it's very likely that you pay for your decision to go with a cheapskate company with a 3 failures at once situation and you lose data completely
Do not stress on hardware when software and configuration is what matters. Data won’t be corrupted because a modern file system does checksuming and self healing of the blocks. SMART monitoring will alert you when things are about to go bad. There won’t be a loss of data considering backups are off site. TBH actually important part of this setup that needs to be taken care of are 371MB of mostly iddle data.
The nuance take you guys don’t get is that most people aren’t running a service datacenter where every transaction matters. It’s not being a cheap stake. It’s about being smart. Not relying on parts that are harder and more expensive to come by when you can just scale horizontally are a good thing.
It broke? Who cares? Restore backup, resync chain if needed and have it running on a few hours while you are hunting hardware, potentially on eBay hunting for used discarded corporate hardware. Vendor will RMA right? Save money and get some extra sats.
> Backup is worthless if its stored on a device with poor quality control
Why would you store backups on the same device?
> avoid this brand because in the days of spinning disks
SSDs are are a totally different beast. In this case the NAND chips are built by Sandisk and controllers are Marvell. If it breaks I will get another and get stuff running for no price.
You also don’t need to rely on anecdotal experiences from 20 years ago. There is Blackblaze that publishes reports every year.