Headworx

I mentioned briefly the issues fir Western Digital / SanDisk portable SSD drives losing all recorded data briefly in the July 2023 post . Fast forward a month now and we have lawsuits against the company saying Western Digital "engaged in a scheme to mislead consumers". It is impossible for consumers (or even professionals) to test / fully evaluate products for their true capability of delivering on the claims. But drives are meant to store data. This is fundamental. Of course they have their MTBF ratings and ultimately will fail over time due to mechanical or electronic wear, but this is not the case here. The SanDisk drives can lose all data at once even if carefully treated and rarely used. Typically most of us expect the companies value their brands the most, as a brand value is most tedious to build and may take a brief moment to collapse. Western Digital somehow does not understand that. Or they don't care, which is also a plausible theory, as they have already bee...

One big gap which exists in one of the most popular consumer device categories is the missing link between standalone cameras and smartphones. I wrote on this a number of times before . Of course the fundamental gap is the lack of a full-stack communications standard. One that would allow any phone to connect to any camera without a special dedicated app for that particular camera. It sounds super obvious and in the past there even was a digital camera working group at Bluetooth SIG. But that group never produced anything (any specification) reaching the adoption phase. Clearly members of that group did not have enough motivation to create the standard They clearly thought they would achieve better results doing it in a proprietary way. But even in a proprietary way - they failed. The cameras' smartphone apps are infuriating - writes Richard Butler at DPReview. Yes they are. This statement probably does not apply to the latest - meant by design to be connected - photo and video ca...

Software has been eating the world. On one end this is really powerful. The dream of a hardware product being continuously improved with "just" software updates. This has clearly worked for computers and smartphones. Of course to some extent, as there always comes a point when a new update is not enabled on "old" hardware. But generally everyone expects whatever they buy today will be a better prodict tomorrow. And in a year or two. The other side of the coin are products which simply should work as-is, and nobody is expecting any updates to come. Yet these products are very often too software-driven. And when this embedded software has bugs, the products may suddenly fail. There are many stories like that. Some examples: SanDisk Extreme SSDs abruptly failing (and the follow-up story ) Sonos Arc soundbar " pop of death " Mazda FM radio bricked Of course they are just examples what can happen (and does happen). The SanDisk issue is particularly nasty, as i...

Facing the loss of archived data - the last week's post - I needed a quick decision on the alternative solution. The straightforward way would be to upgrade the old Networked Attached Storage (NAS) server. It clearly has been failing and despite a bunch of bulged capacitors in the power supply unit (PSU), replacing the PSU did not solve the problem. Of four disks one was declared dead almost immediately after start and a second one was being flagged as dead shortly after. I could stuff the old chassis with new disks, but two disks dying at the same time smells like the problem is elsewhere. On top of that the software on the NAS has been no longer maintained (another civilization disease) and there have been issues using it with newer versions ow Windows (I think it was Windows 10 which officially declared the old SMB protocol fundamentally unsafe). But another angle of the NAS story is also important. Historically the NAS server was the home multimedia server with stored music an...