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Comment by adolph | Hacker News Reader

The affected model here, known as My Book Live, uses an ethernet cable to connect to a local network. From there, users can remotely access their files and make configuration changes through Western Digital cloud infrastructure. Western Digital discontinued the My Book Live in 2015. The support forum thread was first reported by Bleeping Computer.

The affected product is not a drive but a NAS solution. In terms of being a reasonable consumer my thought process is to evaluate distinctive products differently.

NAS is a cheap computer with attached drives. It’s going to have computer-like failure modes.

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Non-technical users don't care about this distinction. The name Western Digital is on both, and that name's brand value is destroyed forever if this indeed turns out to be irreversible. Though they could probably pivot to selling their drives in other's NAS devices without much difficulty if they want to remain in this market.

Non-technical users don't really buy hard drives individually, they would at most ask their computer-savvy friend or go to a shop who will replace it for them.

I highly doubt the average non-technical user even knows who produced the hard drive they own.

These are external drives, and I'd guess the vast majority of external drives are purchased by non-technical users.

> Non-technical users don't really buy hard drives individually

Yes, they do. My dad bought two WD My Book drives by himself as backup drives. He luckily was not aware that those things have an extra software for backups, nor how to install it, but those things are just sold like that targeted to the average user in your average computer store.

Internal drives, you're right, likely wouldn't be bought by a non-techie alone.

But THIS affected type of drive is specifically marketed to a very non-technical user, and I can certainly confirm my non-technical friends and family have bought products in this segment independently, whereas my techie friends steer clear.

It's a NAS that's made to look like a drive. My techie friends would never buy it - they'd get Synology/QNAP, or do their own over-complicated time-consuming solution (slight editorial opinion there ;), or use cloud backup, or some combo. But my dad, mother in law, and other relatives have products like this, and have purchased them on their own. In fact, I think when asked, most techies would in fact go against the notion of buying cheap but internet-exposed storage device for a non-technical friend :O

Your slight editorial opinion reminded me of this HN hot-take from the DropBox announcement:

> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

This is how non-technical users learn. How about.. don't have an internet connected drive? That's what I'll tell my family.

they said the same thing about tylenol in 1982.

Somebody actually poisoned Tylenol. People realize that all the food they eat could have been poisoned in the grocery store. There's no easy mapping to "every external hard drive manufacturer could stop updating their products and your data could spontaneously delete itself."

True, a small computer running an Internet connected general purpose operating system should have a prominently labeled expiration date of some short time after the last patch. Use after that date is not recommended and potentially dangerous. WD sold something that looked like a toaster to the consumer but was actually a lump of cheese.

There have been incidents of (other manufacturers') hard drives shipping with pre-installed malware though [e.g. 0]. I think that's a good analogue for Tylenol.

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/malware-found-on-new-hard-driv...

Well, the GP said "why should anyone ever again trust [Western Digital] to keep their data safe?" Using a Western Digital hard drive, internet connected or not, very much means trusting a WD product with your data.

But I might be reading too literally. And personally, I do intend to continue purchasing Western Digital hard drives, just nothing internet connected, because I agree they're different products with different risks.

From the quote the user you replied to posted it looks as though this is a product that was discontinued six years ago.

I suspect they still produce NAS devices though. I wouldn’t buy one

A NAS isn't actually distinct from a plain drive in that particular way. A plain SATA hard drive is a cheap computer with some attached hardware, just like a NAS. Literally, there's probably at least one ARM CPU core in there controlling everything and communicating over the link to your main computer.

The difference is the protocol that goes over the link. In a NAS, it's SMB/NFS access to files over ethernet/wifi, and for a SATA drive it is the SATA command set accessing blocks. The difference is small.

> The difference is small.

One of these things is talking to the internet on its own accord. The other is not. Small difference, huge implications.

The fault here is because WD's backend/"cloud infrastructure" got hacked. That's on them.

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