News WD Faces Class Action Lawsuit Over SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD Failures

[Admin]

WD / SanDisk faces a class action suit after a swell of external SSD reliability / failure complaints back in May.

WD Faces Class Action Lawsuit Over SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD Failures : Read more

 

[Dr3ams]

Backing your data up to one storage device is not good practice. My personal data is backed up to one internal and one external drive. The external drive is always disconnected from the PC and wall socket after every backup. Both are hard disk drives. I don't trust SSDs (M.2 included) enough to use them for backups.

 

[Sluggotg]

In the early days of SSDs, I bought an Intel SSD, (600series). I was thrilled for several weeks. The drive failed and said it was 10mb is size. ( I believe it was a 256gb ). It turns out that when you shut down your computer this drive has a "Feature", it will randomly wipe the data and make it unusable. Intel responded by releasing as "FIX". If you ran their Fix program it would make the drive work.. But Of Course, All data is gone.
So Intel's Final Answer was not to recall or actually fix the drives they just hung their hat on "Sometimes it takes a while for it to fail and you can make it sorta functional again with our program". For some reason I have never purchased another Intel SSD.

 

[Greg7579]

Come on Dr 3. Seriously? You trust a spinning rust drive more than a SSD?
But your point is outstanding. I have my 6 TB of image files backed up to two external 10TB spinners that I disconnect from everything (power and the PC) when not doing a sync, and I also back up to 2 internal Samsung QVO 870 8 TB SSDs, that have dropped from 900 bucks when I bought my first one to 320 bucks now. I use both but would greatly prefer SSDs. SSDs are far more reliable and many times faster, despite this particluar model's bad outcome.

 

[Brian28]

Come on Dr 3. Seriously? You trust a spinning rust drive more than a SSD?
But your point is outstanding. I have my 6 TB of image files backed up to two external 10TB spinners that I disconnect from everything (power and the PC) when not doing a sync, and I also back up to 2 internal Samsung QVO 870 8 TB SSDs, that have dropped from 900 bucks when I bought my first one to 320 bucks now. I use both but would greatly prefer SSDs. SSDs are far more reliable and many times faster, despite this particluar model's bad outcome.

An SSD in general is more reliable, but when it does fail, it's often a total loss. A spinning drive often has failures in either motor or electronics, in which case the data is still intact and can be recovered with the right service, or it has failure in individual blocks, in which case you lose only a small portion of your data. (And even then recovery is still often possible.)

 

[PEnns]

'Krum says he bought a SanDisk Extreme Pro 2TB model for $179.99 on or about May 19, 2023 from Amazon.com."

"on or about"??

If you look at your Amazon orders, it will tell you EXACTLY when the order was placed and delivered! People should be more precise when they're suing a company.

 

[USAFRet]

...and the lost data...

My one and only SSD failure was a 2.5" 960GB SanDisk, back in 2018. Drive purchased in 2015.
Died VERY suddenly.

Had 20+ years of family photos on it...basically my entire life. 605GB data.
I tried everything I could think of to make it come back to life.
Internal, external, other system, other OS...nada.
It was dead dead dead.

I cried over the loss of all that data for about 0 seconds.

Slotted in a temporary HDD, click click in Macrium Reflect...
90 mins later, all 605GB data recovered exactly as it was at 4AM that morning when it ran its nightly incremental backup.

Even though it was 33 days past the 3 year warranty, SanDisk gave me a new one anyway. 5 years later, the replacement is still going strong.

Now....SanDisk/WD not replacing or fixing this particular model...bad move.

 

[jonathan1683]

not a good look, I always thought sandisk was high quality.

 

[Rokinamerica]

'Krum says he bought a SanDisk Extreme Pro 2TB model for $179.99 on or about May 19, 2023 from Amazon.com."

"on or about"??

If you look at your Amazon orders, it will tell you EXACTLY when the order was placed and delivered! People should be more precise when they're suing a company.

That is boilerplate legalese. Prevents other party from using a technical issue on date being an issue. Pure CYA.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

California consumers only: California law provides that for in-warranty service, California residents have the option to return the Product to (A) the retail store location where the Product was purchased or (B) to another retail store location that sells the SanDisk product of the same type.

From their warranty page.

SanDisk may, at its option, either: (1) repair or replace the Product with a new reconditioned or refurbished Product of equal or greater capacity, or another equivalent product; or (2) refund the current market value of the Product at the time the warranty claim is made to SanDisk if SanDisk is unable to repair or replace the Product.

Also from their warranty page (which is a pretty standard clause). The suit's going to get tossed.

 

[razor512]

Western digital is horrible with firmware updates to a point where known issues fail to remain fixed. For example, who remembers the PCIe payload size bug issue with the SN850?

WD Black SN850 SSD Loses Over 40% of Performance When Connected To X570 Chipset

This is an issue specific to X570

www.tomshardware.com

New WD SN850 SSD Firmware Restores AMD X570 Performance

Performance recovered!

www.tomshardware.com

WD eventually pushed out an update for it, but they ignored the fact that the issue existed on the SN750, SN770 and SN850x. Drives that came out after the SN850 ended up with the payload bug. WD essentially only did the most minimum possible fix in the most narrow way possible as a direct response to massive community backlash and negative press by only addressing the single product that was in the articles and none of the others that has the same exact bug.

That type of work ethic likely contaminated the Sandisk drive with "fixes" designed to just stop a negative media cycle rather than thoroughly address the issues spanning multiple products.

 

[Dr3ams]

And then there is the price. I can get a 4TB HDD from WD or Seagate for around 80 Euros. The same SSD capacity from Samsung or WD will cost me around 200 Euros. In the next few months I'm going to replace the three 1TB internal and the one 2TB external HDDs with 3 4TB HDDs. I'd rather pay 240 Euros for new storage than 600.

 

[USAFRet]

And then there is the price. I can get a 4TB HDD from WD or Seagate for around 80 Euros. The same SSD capacity from Samsung or WD will cost me around 200 Euros. In the next few months I'm going to replace the three 1TB internal and the one 2TB external HDDs with 3 4TB HDDs. I'd rather pay 240 Euros for new storage than 600.

Comparing price vs size between HDD and SSD is useless.

2 totally different purposes.

 

[Dr3ams]

Comparing price vs size between HDD and SSD is useless.

2 totally different purposes.

Not for me. They are both storage and I see them as storage. For me it's about price. If SSDs were the same price as HDDs, then I would buy those. The reason? SSDs are faster.

 

[USAFRet]

Not for me. They are both storage and I see them as storage. For me it's about price. If SSDs were the same price as HDDs, then I would buy those. The reason? SSDs are faster.

For mass storage, esp. long term...yes, HDD.

For actual daily use? Solid state all the way.

 

[Math Geek]

i have one of these and i am not impressed at all. no data loss but it has never transferred any file past about 30 MB/s. read or write.

not even close to the 550 MB/s it claims.

i have an old 7200 rpm hdd that transfers at 50 MB/s easy.

i don't bother storing anything on it now and just use it as a temp travel device. i don't trust it at all, especially with the current issues.

and i was so happy to get one 🙁

 

[Grobe]

i have one of these and i am not impressed at all. no data loss but it has never transferred any file past about 30 MB/s. read or write.

not even close to the 550 MB/s it claims.

What file system you use?

It would have being somewhat interesting to see if one such disk formatted with xfs (reputation of being more effective for larger files) and see if any difference - or possibly f2fs which is supposed to be tuned for better performance on solid state storage devices.

 

[Math Geek]

Pretty sure it's ntfs but that's a guess. Doubt I picked fat32 or other different option

 

[razor512]

i have one of these and i am not impressed at all. no data loss but it has never transferred any file past about 30 MB/s. read or write.

not even close to the 550 MB/s it claims.

i have an old 7200 rpm hdd that transfers at 50 MB/s easy.

i don't bother storing anything on it now and just use it as a temp travel device. i don't trust it at all, especially with the current issues.

and i was so happy to get one 🙁

In cases like that, I wonder if there is some damage with the USB port of the device that is causing it to drop to USB 2.0 mode.

 

[Grobe]

In cases like that, I wonder if there is some damage with the USB port of the device that is causing it to drop to USB 2.0 mode.

Probably not. After reading this , my understanding is the usb link layer is responsible for negotiating data transfer speed between the two units.