Back on 31 December 2022, GeoCities crashed hard when its WD Blue SA510 1 TB SSD, model WDS100T3B0B, became unusable for normal writes. The drive was running firmware 52008100. Western Digital later published critical firmware updates for this SA510 family: 52020100 addressed drives not being recognised, and a later 52046100 release addressed a condition where a drive could enter read-only mode. That makes firmware a very relevant suspect here, but my one failed drive does not prove firmware was the only possible cause.

The hardware failure of the the WD Blue SATA blade hard drive powering GeoCities was enough to take it offline. It was a WD Blue SA510 1TB model WDS100T3B0B.

After 606 hours and 43 power cycles it was in read-only mode (GeoCities data is still there when read with iBored) in Ubuntu and Mac OS but doesn’t show anything in Windows. Being overly cautious, I had another drive ready to go. The bad news is, that other drive was of the same vintage. It should be noted that the 606 power-on hours is probably a result of being on since the RetroChallenge 2022/10.

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 some bad firmware from Western Digital. The good news is, there was an update.

The failed drive could not update from 52008100 to 52020100 through WD Dashboard. It was already stuck in the failure state, so the firmware updater was not a recovery tool for it. 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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