52 points
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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?”

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16 points

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.

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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.

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11 points

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.

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1 point

Yup, they’ve been the reliable, fast brand for me for SD cards for years. I’m not going to buy their SSDs, but I’ll buy their SD cards any day of the week.

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11 points
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Deleted by creator
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4 points

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.

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5 points
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Deleted by creator
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2 points

I had many USB drives and SD cards from them, one actually died after 5 years in my phone and it’s not actually fully dead. My Pi runs from them, no problems there.

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34 points

The complaint is seeking class-action certification on behalf of people who bought a 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, or 4TB SanDisk Extreme Pro, SanDisk Extreme, or Western Digital My Passport SSD that was “designed, manufactured, distributed, promoted and/or sold” since January 2023.

Looks like this is for people who’ve purchased the drives since January 2023. So does it not affect people from before?

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21 points

Found a PDF of the complaint from another article, which says “since at least January 2023” on page 15, so, take that as you will.

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5 points

I wonder if that suggests that hardware made prior to that data doesn’t suffer from the same flaws? Or if it’s just an arbitrary cut off they decided on for the affected customers they would include in the lawsuit.

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8 points

Here’s the original article from Ars Technica last May. IIRC this has the details on which drives are suspect.

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5 points

This is the important question.

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18 points

Damn, WD’s been my go-to brand for drives for years.

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1 point

Brand is mostly irrelevant with storage devices in my experience… It’s usually just a matter of luck.

Unless we’re discussing the Quantum Bigfoot…

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-3 points
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Yes please use seagate hahaha 🍿

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1 point

Seagate is fine. They had some notoriously bad models, but on average, they’re pretty similar to WD, at least in the HDD space.

For SSDs, the more important thing is that NAND tech, not the label on the device, and the same brand can carry high quality and low quality NAND chips.

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16 points

We abandoned using SanDisk after WD merged the G-DRIVE into them. This particular model we’ve seen like half a dozen fail over 6 months as well as 3 failures from their 22TB HDD Pro series which is what replaced G-DRIVE. Their quality has really plummeted.

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13 points

Someone should get one of these and dd copy all 0xdeadbeefs to the disk

Then dd it all off and confirm no corruption and it truly is the size it says.

Seen firmwares of shitty sd cards and drives lie about their storage capacity

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9 points

Here is a 15GB card, btw it only has 9GB.

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14 points

The issue with this is the difference between GB (1,000,000,000 bytes) and GiB (1,073,741,824 bytes) https://massive.io/file-transfer/gb-vs-gib-whats-the-difference/

HDD manufacturers use GB, which is a metric measurement, because its better for marketing while computers use GiB, which is a binary measurement. So people think they’re buying 15GiB but in reality they’re buying 13.5GiB marketed as 15GB

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11 points

That’s not the only issue. Some flash drives have been found to completely misrepresent their sizes. There was something of an epidemic of them a few years ago, so much so that people started testing their drives after purchase (with tools eg Fight Flash Fraud). You could fill up the drive, then it would just completely fail as it did not actually have the storage capacity advertised.

Suffice it to say, the data storage industry isn’t without its own brand of shady practices.

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9 points
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Just as a side note for any reader that doesn’t already know it, the computer ones are 2 to the power of a multiple of 10.

So 1 kilobyte is 210 (which is 1024) bytes, 1 MiB is 220 (1048576) btes and so on.

So there is actually some logic behind the wierd looking numbers.

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2 points

True, and adding the filesystem also takes off somewhat. That, however, doesn’t explain 15 vs 9 gb

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-2 points

And then you have to put a filesystem on it, which has its own metadata – file attributes and folder/file names and so on. If you use NTFS you lose at least 12.5% to the metadata so now you’re down to 11.8 GiB. 😛

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-4 points

It’s worse than that, the computer will still see 15GB, however when you fill it beyond 9GB everything will turn to shit and get corrupted. The idea being that this won’t happen until some time after the purchase, making it harder to return.

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