Back in late December, and I’m talking right on 31st December 2022, GeoCities crashed hard. Its SSD had become unusable for normal writes while running firmware 52008100. Firmware, I’m looking at you! It was a very relevant suspect, though this one failed drive doesn’t prove it was the only possible cause.

The failed drive powering GeoCities was a WD Blue SA510 1 TB M.2 SATA SSD, model WDS100T3B0B. That little blade-shaped SSD was enough to take the whole site offline.

The drive reported 606 power-on hours and 43 power cycles, and it was behaving as read-only. GeoCities data was still there when read with iBored. I could read it in Ubuntu and macOS, but couldn’t get at the data in my Windows setup, even though WD Dashboard could see the drive. Being overly cautious, I had another drive ready to go. The bad news is, that other drive was of the same vintage. This was the drive I’d been using for RetroChallenge 2022/10; its reported power-on hours aren’t a measure of the calendar time since then.

The above is my secondary drive, the offline backup for GeoCities. Interestingly it updated without any issues. It had 2 hours of uptime and 26 power cycles, somehow. It was also on 52008100 and successfully updated to 52020100, which was the available fix I had at the time.

I was not alone. Both drives were running 52008100, one of the firmware versions covered by Western Digital’s critical update notice. The good news was that 52020100 was available, and my backup drive accepted it. WD’s later release history dates that detection fix to 27th October 2022, before this failure. It also lists 52046100, dated 25th May 2023, for a read-only issue. That second fix came after this April post, so it helps explain the firmware suspicion in hindsight; it wasn’t the update I was trying here.

The failed drive wouldn’t update from 52008100 to 52020100 through WD Dashboard. I couldn’t recover it that way, so after a quick warranty check and message to the initial seller, it was sent back for repair or replacement.

Not too long later I received a replacement and copied GeoCities back across, completely forgot the mount point and nearly set fire to my Raspberry Pi 4. Mission accomplished! 🤷‍♀️

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