Steam dropped support for HDDs

[俄]

You can tell me to switch to SDDs all day long; not my problem, I'm trying to help friends and family who are still trying to boot their stuff from HDDs. Steam is currently BROKEN for HDDs in all shapes and forms (internal, external, high or low quality and high or low space)

What's going on, this started happening with HDDs late 2019 but it's still going on and it's stupid af, if anyone has anything to say other than "BUY MORE HARDWARE" it's welcome thanks

[Satoru]

Diposting pertama kali oleh Elucidator:

That does happen actually. They do try to make disks break earlier, some of them at least, so that not all of them break earlier.

No they do not do this. Ever.

All disks are manufactured by machines. No human is in control there. Even soldering happens by machines, so its really odd not all of them have live as long.

Manufacturing has lots of variances in it even in fully automated systems. Also note that people use and have drives in a variety of conditions which will drastically change the lifecycle of even an utterly identical drive.

That said, if you buy a deskstar, it should have been made in the same factory as IBM made them, so it should be good.

This is hilarious given that the nickname for the old Deskstar drives was DEATHstar because they were so reliably unreliable your data was pretty much playing russian roulette every time you turned on your computer.

[Mad Scientist]

They most definitely did not drop support for HDDs.

It's also SSD, not SDD. Solid State Disk.

Diposting pertama kali oleh クソ野郎:

No. Try to install any game into an HDD no matter how new and large it is. OBS record and upload it to youtube it friend. Tell me it doesn't tell you it has a "Disk write error".

Mine doesn't. There's either instability in your system resulting in bad writes, or there's a health issue of the HDD or heavy fragmenting of the HDD, even possibly a bad data or power cable.

Diposting pertama kali oleh クソ野郎:

but my family and friends are getting the same "Disk write error" with brand new HDDs internal and even external. Laptops and desktops, completely different motherboards and CPU and GPU setups.

Most likely they're doing something wrong or they're all using something that's actively interfering with the downloads with reading/writing. Even my old HDD doesn't have that issue, it just writes slower.

Also if you're using OBS, it's best not to have that making recording on a drive in use for downloads.

Diposting pertama kali oleh クソ野郎:

thanks for your response. I think anything below premium grade HDDs from the top companies of the world are unsupported unofficially (unsupported nonetheless).

Being below a certain level makes the difference between "recommended" and "not recommended" depending on the task & load. Unsupported would be an incompatible OS or part, and being a standard HDD would not officially or unofficially make it unsupported. The App is outright compatible for HDDs.

Diposting pertama kali oleh クソ野郎:

Just a little caveat that when you try to install your rightfully purchased software into the HDD you get disk write errors.

Which is not at fault of Steam nor the Game or Software.

Diposting pertama kali oleh クソ野郎:

Sorry I can't make a PHD Thesis from Cambridge or Harvard about how valve screwed up an entire hemisphere of users

Few people most likely running similar things interfering with the writing process doesn't magically make some sort of super issue, or we would be bombarded with reports of it every minute of the day.

[Muppet among Puppets]

If you really have problems for years, what thing was allways present through that time? That could be the source.
How fast is your internet? What happens if you slow downloads to lets say 2mB/s? For a test.

Were the drives external drives?

[B-o-B]

in before GPU being dropped c0s 3nRg3?

Ridiculous thought, please do something constructive with this wild imagination you've acquired.
Don't include the Steam Platform next time, bite of less.

How can you not just come here and say your having a hardware issue like everyone else?

[Elucidator]

Diposting pertama kali oleh Satoru:

This is hilarious given that the nickname for the old Deskstar drives was DEATHstar because they were so reliably unreliable your data was pretty much playing russian roulette every time you turned on your computer.

That was exactly one disk type: Deskstar 75GXP.
That is not a modern disk. It is also that same disk that got IBM's hdd industry a lawsuit, and it was before the tech was given to hitachi. Currently the desk and ultrastar series are in hands of WesternDigital. These disks are way beyond the 75GXP.

Also, considering you said

Diposting pertama kali oleh Satoru:

No they do not do this. Ever.

on my comment earlier:

According to Backblaze, which tested 25,000 drives as part of the study, HDDs fail in one of three ways. They fail very soon after installation due to factory defects, they randomly fail at any point in time for unknown reasons, and they fail after a period due to wear and tear. If your drive doesn’t fail immediately, then, you can expect it to last the three- to five-year estimate.

here's a quote from western digital:

All our products must pass our stringent quality standards before leaving our factory to be free from defects in materials and craftsmanship. We stand behind our products throughout the device's factory warranty period. You can contact us directly via phone to address any questions or concerns to ensure a good overall user experience.

heres a quote from seagate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oio1yTxtUU8

The summary is, seagate claims they don't just quality check and test for defects on each disk, but also the customer experience.

In other words, every drive is tested and approved of to enter a customer's hands 'before shipment'.
This means factory defective drives ending up in a consumers hands is intentional.

Here's a dumb graph backblaze uses to advertise their cloud storage, while explaining that hdd drives fail.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/bathtub-curve-1024x723.png

They also complain about SSDs obviously.
but never mind.

The point is, you can extrapolerate this information to a conclusion that factories, knowing they check every drive, do not want drives to last equally as long and purposely make them defective up front.
Why would a for-profit company do this?
Money would be the most basic assumption, and it is a practise in business we have seen to be effective since philips played the trick on light bulbs in order to increase revenue.

[davidb11]

You know it's completely incorrect to ever claim they do it on purpose, right?
Hard drive failure is a thing that can happen.

Same with hardware as a whole.
Your claim is like saying smoking doesn't kill people. :P

IT just makes no sense ever.
Please provide actual proof of factory defects being intentional and not done by accident.
Spoiler, oyu did not do that at all.

Also any company that did that would GO INSTANTLY BANKRUPT overnight by the sheer amount of lost sales equaling 100%.

Again no company intentionally makes a person's hard drive fail.
That's insane to ever claim.

Also, by bringing up Phillips in some weird claim about light bulbs, makes no sense as well.
Every single time any object on Earth has failed, it was never due to the manufacturer physically allowing damaged or destroyed goods to be shipped.
For the sake of money. It is because goods can fail. Randomly, and without any maliciousness behind it.
Hell, it's impossible ot claim simple maliciousness ever here.

Claiming otherwise flies in the face of the last 5000 years of creation of goods. :P
Literally, there is 5000 years worth of evidence of no one actively destroying their own goods for the sake of money.
And money was a lot more powerful even 2000 years ago than it was today. :P

[Elucidator]

Diposting pertama kali oleh davidb11:

Please provide actual proof of factory defects being intentional and not done by accident.
Spoiler, oyu did not do that at all.

I showed evidence that they check and test every disk up front to see their life expectency and quality.
And if you want prove that drives failed early, some backup company called backblaze tested 25000 disks and noticed one of the most prominent reasons is early drive failure due to factory defects.

Diposting pertama kali oleh davidb11:

Again no company intentionally makes a person's hard drive fail.
That's insane to ever claim.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
it is a known business practise.
that like I said has been executed on light bulbs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

in fact apple is hated for it for doing it for years.
and they went a bit too far with it with the m1 processor destroying the ssd in a year's life.
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/02/23/m1-mac-users-report-excessive-ssd-wear/
keep in mind that, the ssd is paired cryptographically and soldered onto the motherboard, as are many other pieces, so drive broken means laptop useless, unless you have the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pairing tool.

and apple is still in business.
They have been preventing people from fixing their stuff, etc.
https://www.howtogeek.com/731791/what-is-planned-obsolescence-and-how-does-it-affect-my-devices/

https://whatever101how.wordpress.com/2020/04/18/planned-obsolescence-your-ssd-will-self-destruct-in-4-years/
https://www.gillware.com/hard-drive-data-recovery/planned-obsolescence-hard-drives/
This article points to this guide on how you could use to circumvent the planned obsolescence of your external western digital hdd:
https://nl.ifixit.com/Guide/Temporary+repairing+Western+Digital+Essentials+HD+de-soldered+USB+connector/14073
like... these guides exist for no reason, because its an insane claim. e.e;

2017:

Apple just got smacked with a class action lawsuit after the tech giant admitted it slowed down older iPhones. This act is also known as planned obsolescence. Wikipedia defines planned obsolescence (or built-in obsolescence) as: "in industrial design and economics is a policy of planning or designing a product with an artificially limited useful life, so it will become obsolete (that is, unfashionable or no longer functional) after a certain period of time."

I don't know what you want me to show you.
Scientific papers somewhere?


Edit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5v8D-alAKE
This should be a trusted youtube channel.