There’s basically duopoly in storage domain. WD and Seagate own most of the market. Although in SSD there are some options like Samsung, Corsair, Sabrent, Crucial etc.
I’m really furious at this. I bought a bunch in the past two years as that’s my go-to brands for my backup solutions. And in the past week, had to buy different brands to diversify.
My main takeaway:
Don’t buy SanDisk. Don’t buy Western Digital.
I don’t care if it’s only a few models. I’m not risking my data.
So far these issues only apply to these specific SSDs … fingers crossed it stays that way, because like you I’ve got a number of WD HDDs in my life.
WD got in trouble not too long ago for deceptively marketing shingled drives as conventional. Back to back issues like this is going to leave a lasting impression on the kinds of people who buy drives.
“so far” is the operative word.
You really don’t want to discover you’re suddenly part of the 2024 list of drives that also are corrupt.
And frankly, your data should never be in question. Short of a drive failure where the whole drive dies, which would require data recovery services, your data should be safely stored. IMO that’s the premise of data storage; and bluntly, it’s the only job it has… To store, keep, and retrieve data when asked.
If it cannot do that, or has any nontrivial risk of being unable to do that, then it’s not worth the plastics that make up the case. Unless you’re using the drive as a temp/scrub/whatever disk, it’s unusable in my opinion.
So what did you end up buying and was that just random choice or based on some research/experience?
Samsung, bit more pricey but both my ssd and ram are both Samsung chips and I haven’t had a single problem with either.
E. Seems that further down the thread someone is saying Samsung is having issues too, which is dissapointing as I’ve always trusted Samsung.
Samsung has been hit or miss. For example EVO 840 were a mess a few years ago, had two of them, both slowed to a crawl (Firmware issue, Samsung never managed to fix it).
It’s all a mess :-/
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In May, Ars Technica reported about customer complaints that claimed SanDisk Extreme SSDs were abruptly wiping data and becoming unmountable.
Ian Sloss, one of the lawyers representing Matthew Perrin and Brian Bayerl in a complaint filed yesterday, told Ars he doesn’t believe class-action certification will be a major barrier in a case “where there is a common defect in the firmware that is consistent in all devices.”
Perrin and Bayerl’s complaint mentions the 2TB Extreme, which Western Digital hasn’t officially confirmed as an affected device.
Jafri’s complaint says he bought an Extreme Pro (capacity not specified) because he was on an extended van trip and needed storage for drone footage, photos, and travel mementos.
The cases seek restitution, including damages, and for Western Digital to stop selling the affected drives until they’re fixed or the problems are fully disclosed on all labels, packaging, and advertising.
Sloss told Ars that challenges of the case might include establishing how frequently drives failed after Western Digital shared its May firmware update.
The original article contains 771 words, the summary contains 168 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Me with 2 WD HDDs and 2 Sandisk SD card: this is fine
The complaints are only about a specific line of external ssds. You’re fine.
The complaints are about this specific line, but reflect poorly on the business decisions going into that line, which in turn makes it hard to trust those same managers not to make anti-consumer choices in the future. I’m not going to take my WD/Sandisk drives out of use early, but I’m probably done buying new ones from them.
Back in the day, working with WD was a nightmare. The spinning HDs never came with a keyed IDE cable. It must have saved them $.0001 per HD shipped. If you accidentally put the cable in backwards, it not only burned out the logic board on the WD HD, it would also burn out any other drives on the cable. And the IDE controller on the motherboard. Now it is easy to remember how to do it right. Install the power cable and then make sure the red wire on the power cable was next to the red wire (pin 1) on the IDE cable. But if you rush or make an assumption, that was an expensive mistake.
This sounds like maybe early 90’s possibly without voltage regulators at the molex connector. I’ve been doing this a very long time and have never heard of this.
I’ve serviced computers where the ide cable key was hand-striped or with some other marking with a marker as opposed to the line (spoon’s red wire) already keyed from factory, somewhere mid 90’s. regular procedure at that shop i think at that time to mark any unkeyed cable found. not that i ever had to mark any single one, so even then they were really old ide cables.
Actually…i kind or remember a motherboard coming up in smoke from one of those when someone made a mistake. brand new first week technician i think.
