Is WDDA and Drive Power on Hours Warnings Impacting QNAP Users?
In recent weeks, we have been discussing an on going story surrounding a Western Digital drive health monitoring tool called WDDA (Western Digital Device Analytics). You can find out much more about it in our video here, our original article here or over on channel friend Spacerex’ video here (he broke the story). In brief, the issue surrounds a health monitoring component of WDDA that presents a NAS user with a warning when a drive is 3 years old that suggests they buy a new drive, despite the drive still working perfectly. However, up until now, the main brand that people have been discussing in conjunction with WDDA has been synology. However, they are not the only brand in town! What about arguably their biggest rival in the home/prosumer market, QNAP? Are they impacted by WDDA? And how are they approaching the matter of how warning from WDDA is interpreted by their QTS NAS Software? Let’s discuss.
Quick Recap – Why is everyone angry about WDDA on WD Red HDDs?
WDDA operates similarly to Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.). Recently, there was a situation involving WD Red NAS Hard drives equipped with WDDA running on Synology’s DSM 7.0 systems. After three years (counted in powered-on hours), WDDA issued a warning suggesting the drives should be replaced, despite the drives still being in perfectly good health. This led to a heated debate online. Although Synology’s response to this issue was to cease supporting WDDA in their DSM 7.1 and 7.2 updates, they have not confirmed the reasons for this decision. While this has stirred up discussion, the approach of another significant player, QNAP, has been different. Until 2023, QNAP had not supported or integrated WDDA into their QTS or QuTS NAS operating system (though SMART, Seagate Ironwolf and their own QNAP DA Drive Analyzer have been in either software for a while now). This changed in the reveal of the beta and eventual release candidates (RC’s) of QTS 5.1. WDDA has been included in the system storage manager and is accessible via the individual disk monitoring areas an in their new Drive Failure Prediction feature, which uses the multitude of drive health monitoring tools to predict a drive’s potential failure, then cloning the contents of a suspected drive to a healthy one in order to avoid the lost time/performance impact of traditional drive RAID rebuilds when a drive fails.
So, in order to find out a little more about QTS/QuTS 5.1 handles WDDA integration and notifications, Eddie (aka EddieTheWebGuy) took to Putty and used SSH to dig into the backend of the software and identifying what WDDA tests are included in the service and how they are acknowledged/used by the system. So, here are the 18 different WDDA tests and suggested actions:
Then Ed was able to find the interpretations that QNAP have of these tests. It looks like QNAP did not modify these messages in their own internal actions, however, there was no indication of whether these warnings would be actioned. To be more specific, he was not able to ascertain what QTS 5.1 would do if the WDDA drive inside the QNAP QTS 5.1 system would action the WDDA drive 3yrs hours warning in the QTS GUI to the end user. They could be seen, but there was also every possibility that they would only be presented in the WDDA section of the storage manager or in QuLogs, but in an non-direct fashion. There is not enough information here to identify this. Plus, it is not easy to fake the # of hours on an HDD for the system to action the WDDA warning, so we cannot artificially replicate it.
Lastly, WDDA’s support in the new QTS 5.1 Drive Failure Prediction (Predicted Migration) feature is not enabled by default AND is customizable in the extent to which the information it feeds to the calculations of a drive’s failure. This can be adapted to the user’s specifications from within the Storage manager.
Now, QNAP adding support of WDDA on WD Red/Purple drives is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, the WDDA test comprises 18 individual tests (not just the power-on-hours test that people are taking issue with) that are made up of unique test types/metrics and/or tests that are comprised of existing SMART values, but presented in a much more human-friendly way. However, there are still question marks around the following utility of WD Red/Purple Drives that support WDDA and QNAP QTS 5.1. Namely, the following:
- Are WDDA services in QTS 5.1 on by default?
- Is there an easy option to disable them?
- What happens when a WDDA warning is pushed to the QNAP QTS system and how/if it is presented to the end user?
These are things that I was not able to completely ascertain in my testing (see the video below), so I reached out to QNAP to ask them.
QNAP and WDDA in QTS 5.1 – Questions and Answers
Although the questions that I put to QNAP regarding their position and support of WDDA in QTS 5.1 are covered in the video above, I include them below:
Question: “What is the default status of WDDA in the QNAP QTS 5.1 Storage Manager? Is it on or off by default?”
“In the current release candidate of QTS 5.1, the Western Digital Device Analytics service is enabled by default. This was to allow the benefits of the additional layer of on drive monitoring analysis to be available immediately to the end user.”
Question: “I was not able to find any means to disable the WDDA service from within QTS 5.1, aside from via an SSH command level action. Is there an option I missed or by design?”
“QTS 5.1 (rc2) does not currently feature the option to disable WDDA, not dissimilar to it not having the facility to disable S.M.A.R.T services. Users can choose to access and download the WDDA test results, but they also have the option to disregard it’s findings. We have also incorporated Western Digital Device Analytics into our predicted drive failure service in QTS 5.1, alongside Seagate Ironwolf Health Management, S.M.A.R.T and our own Drive Analyzer partner service. This is disabled by default and, when enabled, users can tailor the extent to which this information will be utilized in drive failure prediction to greatly minimize time traditionally lost to RAID rebuilding in the event of a drive failure. We will continue to listen to our user base and if the need for a change on WDDA support and its default functionality is clearly requested, we will of course oblige.”
Question: “How are WDDA notifications and alerts handled by QNAP QTS 5.1? More specifically, if the WDDA service sends a warning notification that a drive has exceeded 3 years in hours, how is that message interpreted and delivered to the user in QTS?”
“Suggested actions are supplied to us by Western Digital and in the majority of cases, we have not changed this message in our notifications center. We do not display this as a ‘Warning’ message, instead classifying it as an ‘Advisory’. Our Notifications Center and QuLog Center both allot users to tailor their alerts and actions into ‘Information’, ‘Warning’ and ‘Error’. If a user does not change the default targeting of these groups, a power on hours warning will be treated as Information. This is reflected in the current version of QTS 5.1 rc2 and subject to change.”
Question: “In light of current concerns over the handling of ‘power on hours suggested replacement’ by WDDA services, will QNAP be continuing to include this component in the full release of QTS 5.1?”
“WDDA is included in QTS 5.1 rc2 and we believe it to be a useful addition to the existing range of drive health and analysis tools at the users disposal. We will of course listen to our customers and if a need for how drive health information is delivered is requested, we will oblige.”
Conclusion
As mentioned earlier, it is not necessarily bad that QNAP is integrating WDDA into QTS 5.1. As long as users have the ability to scale it’s notifications and use OR those notifications are not aggressively delivered, then WDDA does deliver a user-friendly alternative to SMART for some of the HDD analytics. However, the use of the 3 years drive warning on some systems that suggest purchasing a new WD drive (especially in the case of HDDs that are Pro class with 5 Year warranty inclusive) has certainly rubbed a lot of users up the wrong way! As we have detailed online in our WDDA videos, if the notification was tweaked, perhaps to kick in when a drive is one month away from the expiry of it’s warranty and served just as a reminder that the drive will no longer be in warranty from X date (again, not a warning, just as ‘information’), that might be a great deal more popular. For now, QNAP sounds like they are willing to listen to their user base on how they roll out in QTS 5.1 from Release Candidate to Full release. We will continue to keep an eye on this in future.
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