Hard choices

I read with interest in the Summer 2021 edition (N-photo 127) that you featured four different Western Digital desktop HDS. I would not recommend WD… I had a single-drive WD NAS, which my wife had around 200 of her photos backed up to. The drive failed with a disk error and became unreadable, out of warranty. I took it to a computer shop and was informed that, as WD used their own drive encryption, they couldn’t access any of the image files. They could, however, send it off to WD and the cost was going to be over £200!

We had to swallow losing the images and I have since purchased a Synology RAID, which uses standard hot-swappable HDS. The Synology has performed well over the past three years, was

easy to set up and not a bad price. I would certainly add Synology to your HD list. Graham Mee

Sorry to hear of your woes with a corrupt disk. While we find Western Digital to be a reputable brand, as reader and data security expert Erik Solhjell wrote in our August 2021 issue (N-photo 126), all HDS are susceptible to eventual failure, so it’s crucial to have your images backed up in at least two places.

All HDS can fail, so a dual-disk RAID setup is a sensible choice.

Here’s Martin’s take on what our Apprentice was doing in Bempton cliffs.