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This isn’t a drive he purchased many months or years ago — it’s the supposedly safe replacement that Western Digital recently sent after his original wiped his data all by itself.
SanDisk issued a firmware fix for a variety of drives in late May, shortly after our story.
But data recovery services can be expensive, and Western Digital never offered Vjeran any the first time it left him out to dry.
Honestly, it feels like WD has been trying to sweep this under the rug while it tries to offload its remaining inventory at a deep discount — they’re still 66 percent off at Amazon, for example.
Unfortunately, the broken state of the internet means Western Digital doesn’t have to work very hard to keep selling these drives.
I’d also like to say shame on CNET, Cult of Mac and G/O Media’s The Inventory for writing deal posts about this drive that don’t warn their readers at all.
It’s basically just a really elaborate angry comment on a SanDisk SSD. Sucks that you lots your data, but it’s a single failure that could happen to basically any drive. Back up what you care about. Absolute waste of time ‘article.’
It’s two failures in a row on a drive that had a known firmware issue that had supposedly been fixed. Given the other reports floating around about this model it seems there could actually be a problem. But to know for sure we’d need statistics which we don’t have.
The Verge is a hit or miss outfit for me. Sometimes they’re fine, but then you remember when they tried to build a PC and you wonder if they really actually know what they’re doing over there.
Apparently they gave that guy (who had never built a PC on camera before) like less than a week to put that video together. Should it have gone out? No, but it’s not the guy in the video’s fault. Source: https://youtu.be/QKzmYsySGFQ
WD writing fake reviews?
There’s no way an actual human wrote such an extensive, detailed but overall dry of content as a review, unless they got it for free in exchange of an enthusiastic review
Edit: the article shows screenshots of clearly fake reviews on Amazon from “verified” buyers. This is what I’m referring to fake reviews
What the hell are you talking about? Consider reading the actual article before commenting something snarky. WD owns SanDisk, and this article is shitting all over them.
Here’s a short version if you can’t be bothered: It’s a follow-up to this article from May where they reported on a bug in SanDisk firmware that erased your data. WD claims to have fixed it with an update, but that appears to be false. The fact that these drives with a high failure rate are also being sold with a deep discount makes it seem like WD/SanDisk is just trying to get rid of defective hardware as quickly as possible while minimizing dollars lost, at the expense of your data.
They were talking about the reviews featured in the article. Did you read it?
What is a good portable HDD to get these days?
Or should I just get one of those little usb m2 cases.
Cheaper? Internal HDDs have been more expensive than USB ones for the last decade or so. Which is why Hard Drive shucking (i.e. ripping the HDD out of the USB enclosure for internal/NAS use) is such a common sport.
(Extremely drunk)
I don’t remember any more.
(Fishes out a SanDisk Extreme SD 128GB card from the box)
Was this the one? I think this was the one.
The one that fucking failed.
…fuck. I had more money than sense a few years ago.
