Is it just me or has SanDisk always been kind of sketchy?
I remember hating them when I was using their SD cards on my Nintendo Wii… I had a lot of those little things fail on me.
They were always the cheapest available USB drives, and it always made me go “why? quality?”
I’ve used so many of their memory cards, flash drives, not much in the way of SSDs. I’ve had only one fail on me, that I can remember. I don’t want to say it’s not happening. But I also wonder how many fakes ppl received, damaging SD’s name. Either way, aside from this latest spat, they’ve made pretty good products. There was another period years ago I felt they dropped the ball, can’t remember why, but otherwise generally good.
Same here. I’ve only stopped using their stuff when it was already too small for me. Their CruzerBlade flash drives are my favorite flash drives thanks to their fast random access. I installed Linux Mint on 1 of them and it runs fairly well. Much faster than HDD unless you’re doing large file transfers. Obviously this greatly limits their lifespan, flash drives can’t handle so many writes.
I just replaced a SanDisk MicroSD card in my phone for Samsung one, and I regret it. Moving many small files is noticeably slower.
On the other hand there’s Philips. Sequential I/O gave me better results than the SanDisk drive, but that thing isn’t even useful as installation disk. That thing is just awfully slow. How they managed to make a flash drive slower than DVD, I don’t understand. But hopefully it’s just faulty unit that I have.
I have used SanDisk cards for years, without issue. They are a huge manufacturer of flash memory, which is why their prices were always good. It is certainly possible and even probable that the quality has gone down. All kinds of companies lower their product’s quality and reliability to make them cheaper to increase profits.
I’ve never had a problem with Kingston, been using the same 1GB drive for over 15 years now and still works perfectly as my live Linux setup. Bought another 64GB one few years back as well.
I also have an over 10 years old Seagate (I guess Samsung now?) 500GB HDD that has been through a couple enclosures but still works perfectly.
I wouldn’t deviate from those 2 brands.