SanDisk's Silence Deafens as High-Profile Users Say Extreme SSDs Still Broken (arstechnica.com) 56
SanDisk's silence this week has been deafening. Its portable SSDs are being lambasted as users and tech publications call for them to be pulled. From a report: The recent scrutiny of the drives follows problems from this spring when users, including an Ars Technica staff member, saw Extreme-series portable SSDs wipe data and become unmountable. A firmware update was supposed to fix things, but new complaints dispute its effectiveness. SanDisk has stayed mum on recent complaints and hasn't explained what caused the problems.
In May, Ars Technica reported on SanDisk Extreme V2 and Extreme Pro V2 SSDs wiping data before often becoming unreadable to the user's system. At least four months of complaints had piled up by then, including on SanDisk's forums and all over Reddit. Even Ars' Lee Hutchinson fell victim to the faulty drives. Two whole Extreme Pros died on him. Both times they filled about 50 percent and then showed a bunch of read and write errors. Upon disconnecting and reconnecting, the drive was unformatted and wiped, and he could not fix either drive by wiping and reformatting. When Ars reached out to SanDisk about the problem in May, it didn't answer most of our questions about why these problems happened (and, oddly, excluded certain models we saw affected when naming which models were affected).
In May, Ars Technica reported on SanDisk Extreme V2 and Extreme Pro V2 SSDs wiping data before often becoming unreadable to the user's system. At least four months of complaints had piled up by then, including on SanDisk's forums and all over Reddit. Even Ars' Lee Hutchinson fell victim to the faulty drives. Two whole Extreme Pros died on him. Both times they filled about 50 percent and then showed a bunch of read and write errors. Upon disconnecting and reconnecting, the drive was unformatted and wiped, and he could not fix either drive by wiping and reformatting. When Ars reached out to SanDisk about the problem in May, it didn't answer most of our questions about why these problems happened (and, oddly, excluded certain models we saw affected when naming which models were affected).
Yep! (Score:5, Interesting)
I recently dealt with this when one of our long-time employees was retiring. Management bought him one of these brand new external Sandisk SSDs and promised him he could use it to back up/copy off any of his personal data he needed from his company laptop before turning it back in for us to wipe and reissue. It turned out not to be much of a "gift" since it gave him problems in the middle of using it and got itself into a "locked" state where it was read-only and showing no data on the drive.
I had to bail him out by offering to get his data copied over for him using an external USB 3 spinning disk portable drive I'd been carrying in my backpack, just in case I gave him mine in trade for the Sandisk. He was happy , but I got stuck with their unreliable garbage drive.
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No failures yet, but I'm pretty disappointed that they may take a shit on me prematurely.
Re:Yep! (Score:4, Informative)
I have two of them. Can't write to, can't read, can't format, can't do anything with them. They're paperweights. And not very effective ones at that.
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Why was this employee even keeping his personal data on this lappy?
re: personal data (Score:2)
Who knows? Not a great idea but this guy was in his mid to later 60's... I doubt he owned another computer at home that was worth a darn. Guess he just got in the habit of saving file attachments from email on the laptop (default location to save them, no doubt) when they were of personal interest, and didn't have a better place to offload them.
SanDisk not what it was (Score:4, Insightful)
I've noticed that the failure rate of SanDisk products has gone WAY up in general. I switched to Samsung Evo+ SD cards because I had so many SanDisk cards fail... And they're not only more reliable, they're faster. Especially for random writes, but also for random READS which every flash memory should do gracefully.
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Pretty much every single SanDisk storage device I have ever purchased has failed before the warranty was up. But they do replace, no problem.
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Unless, like me, you go to a retail store and somehow end up buying a counterfeit product and then SanDisk does not stand behind it. The retail store gave me my money back, while claiming the product was legit. This was 15 years ago, I've never purchased another Sandisk product and never will. Honestly, I think they are liars and do not stand behind the product at all.
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end up buying a counterfeit product and then SanDisk does not stand behind it
How is you buying counterfeit products SanDisk's fault? Why would they "stand behind" something for which you never paid them?
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That's fair enough though. If you buy a stolen car you don't get your money back when the police take it back. Sandisk are hardly going to guarantee something they didn't make - that makes absolutely no sense.
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You are assuming that SanDisk did not make the product and the the retailer is doing something shady. The SanDisk supply chain was compromised, they did not care or were straight up lying. If I cannot trust what I am getting why would I ever buy?
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Probably cheaper than possible firmware design. Some moron in management deciding that everything was fine so the cost could be reduced...
Anyways, good to know.
Anyone still buying their products is.... (Score:2)
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No complaints with Crucial, though. I've been a loyal Crucial customer (DRAM) for decades.
Re:Anyone still buying their products is.... (Score:4, Interesting)
As long as I can avoid the QLC stuff, Samsung has been pretty good. I so far avoid Intel b/c they mostly sell QLC chips. And in general I want to buy brands that own their own foundries, so Crucial, Micron, Samsung, Toshiba [but I haven't bought any Toshiba for a while].
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Though, I give it a bit of a side eye for its NAND marketing- "3-bit MLC", which would generally be called TLC.
I do agree that it has some characteristics in common with MLC in terms of performance metrics, but I still feel it's borderline deceptive marketing.
Ultimately though, I'd give Samsung my money if I were in the market for an M.2 drive again.
These day's I'm cruising along with a M
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I don't merely avoid QLC b/c of performance... heck, for a lot of my purposes I may never notice. I mostly avoid them b/c the TBW/DWPD is 1/3-1/4. and I usually want my SSDs to last 10 years unless I run out of space first.
Speaking of 10 years, I have an OCZ that is still working fine, which is almost surprising given the reputation they got before Toshiba bought them and then killed the brand.
Model Family: Indilinx Barefoot 3 based SSDs
Device Model: OCZ-ARC100
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I mostly avoid them b/c the TBW/DWPD is 1/3-1/4.
Aye- that was included in my "performance metrics", since total writes is a measure of the performance of a drive.
And same- that's my primary concern. How wearable the device is.
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and I usually want my SSDs to last 10 years unless I run out of space first
What's your actual use case? Just looking at something like the 8TB Samsung 870 QVO it is warrantied to 2.8PB written. Yes Petabytes.
I get QLC is less reliable than TLC or lower, but the reality is in 10 years most consumers won't even get close to the limits of QLC SSD. Unless you're using them for database / cache acceleration applications this just isn't a metric you need to worry about. Practically no HDDs in the hands of consumers (especially large drives used for storage) will be written 360x over in
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However, that 2.8PBW goes down to 360TBW when you're talking about a 1TB drive.
That was actually the reasoning that led to me getting the 8TB model for my MacBook. Things are soldered in, may as well get as much theoretical resilience from them as possible.
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However, that 2.8PBW goes down to 360TBW when you're talking about a 1TB drive.
It's 360x storage size regardless of what size drive you get. Less storage is typically purchased for less bytes written. My point still stands. Unless you have a very rare usecase that specifically smashes the SSD as part of a normal workload (server / workstations with large datasets), in 10 years you will *not* even come close to approaching the TBW limit.
Maybe on your OS drive if you have a woefully underpowered computer that spends all its time paging RAM contents to the disk, but then QLC is a bad cho
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So, frankly, bullshit. Your claim is a generalization that has no place on the internet.
Your point was never contested, it was just a crappy point.
2.8PBW is a good number. 360TBW is not.
2.8PBW only applies if you buy an 8 TB drive, which is as far from the norm as you can get.
If I had purchased, say, a 512GB drive, i'd be at 50% of my total write durability in 2 years.
So no, fuck QLC. It's sufficient if you don't mind terrible performa
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Mr. Nit-pick, here.
Wow. That is interesting. The Samsung 980 Pro 1TB (1TB, 500GB, and 250GB) was released September 2020. The 2TB was released in early (maybe January) 2021. Today is 2023-08-10? So how could you have a "2TB Samsung 980 Pro . . . chugging along for 4 years or so"?
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It's an ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo, and it's got a 980 Pro 2TB in it.
Make of that what you will.
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I've got a 2TB Samsung 980 Pro in one of my laptops that I'm happy with. It's been chugging along for 4 years or so.
Though, I give it a bit of a side eye for its NAND marketing- "3-bit MLC", which would generally be called TLC.
I do agree that it has some characteristics in common with MLC in terms of performance metrics, but I still feel it's borderline deceptive marketing.
Ultimately though, I'd give Samsung my money if I were in the market for an M.2 drive again.
These day's I'm cruising along with a MacBook Pro with soldered on who-the-fuck-knows brand NAND of magical-trust-us cell bit density... so I suppose really I can't even criticize WD too much for cramming QLC in their formerly TLC line, as Apple could do the same to me... and I'd never be any wiser.
If there is an ifixit teardown of your MBP, you can probably find the make and model of your Flash storage chips.
Re: Anyone still buying their products is.... (Score:2)
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Louis rossman has stated maby times that's if your mb's nand dies, you're up a creak. They must be all replaced (even if only one chip has issues), and you better hope to god it doesn't hit the bios files REQUIRING a board replacement (yes i didn't mistype that)
Louis Rossman is a lying, self-aggrandizing fool.
With the proper software configuration tool, the only replacement rules are that the Flash chips are the same make and model.
And yes Firmware "BIOS" files CAN be rewritten:
https://support.apple.com/guid... [apple.com]
That's why I call that scab Rossman a Liar.
No matter what, that's what Time Machine backups are for.
Re:Anyone still buying their products is.... (Score:5, Informative)
Western Digital bought SanDisk https://www.theverge.com/2016/... [theverge.com]
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Thank you, came here to say that. And add: companies don't buy other companies to make them better. They want the market share, and squeeze more profits (which you do by cheapening the product (that people will still buy due to brand loyalty)).
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WD SSDs have incredibly poor random I/O performance in my experience. It's like after the takeover, SanDisk has forgotten how to do Flash. And they used to be the most reliable SD cards... How things change.
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SanDisk quality too variable? (Score:2)
Back in "the day" as in the mid-aughts I did phone tech support for SanDisk, back when there was the flash format wars (SD? Compact Flash? XD? Sony Memorystick? SmartMedia? MMC (Which is not SD even though they look exatly the same! Figure that out pleb!) so it was the wild west of NAND.
This was the time when their early USB flash drives launched, the "Cruzer" and "Cruzer Mini".
Well to put it lightly a guy on our team made up a little rhyme to sum up the situation of the amount of RMA's we had to process ev
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A few years ago I was shopping for an SSD and a good friend who is a photographer and videographer (as is his fiancee even more so) fills up disks like crazy. He said SanDisk was the _only_ brand that never failed. So I bought a 1TB that's in this very machine and has been fine, but very slow under Windows. Tests fast under Linux. I don't know why. I didn't install Windows from scratch on it. I've tried all the drivers and optimizations.
Anyway, came to find out it was made under WD ownership, which di
It's Western Digital (Score:3)
Sandisk is just a WD brand like Blue or Red. WD is radio-silent.
Extreme Pro is /supposed/ to be their high-reliability high-performance SKU.
I have two awaiting a fixed firmware before I put data back on them. According to reviews they were excellent last year.
Does WD not know how to fix this or is it possible that it's a hardware problem where firmware cannot fix it and the recall is too expensive to contemplate?
Maybe they had one firmware guru who left the company over some sort of nonsense employee mandate?
We're left to speculate given the dearth of information.
Sooooo ... who do people like for reliable high-IOP laptop SSD's in the $1-200/TB range that's not a WD brand?
I had already given up on their hard drives (for Toshiba).
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WD's only value for years has been playing to a formerly respected company name. The products were crappy low end Chinese crap. Eventually most people caught on and they needed a new name. Did anyone expect the rebrand of WD was going to be any different? This is totally on brand for them.
As soon as they ruin this brand names credibility, like they just did, they will just buy a new name, rebrand, and start the same scam over.
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WD is perfectly finely respected and will often come as the recommended brand here on Slashdot itself. WD purchasing Sandisk wasn't to buy a name, it was to buy the technology. They've kept Sandisk as one name while using their parts to ship WD black SSDs.
So, no WD's brand isn't bad. WD isn't trying to abandon the brand. In all cases they haven't ever stopped using the WD brand. And ... oh right they don't manufacture a single product in China.
I applaud you. It takes serious effort to write a post where eve
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It's bizarre how different people's experiences are. I'm small potatoes, I'll grant you, but in 20 years of maybe hundreds of HDs outside of the known bad firmware Seagates I pretty much DON'T experience HD failure until well after the 7+ year mark. EXCEPT for HGST. It seems that whenever I found a machine that was failing to boot with a device error it was a HGST drive. Oh wait, now that I think about it I did have to replace a bunch of WD Greens, but that's fair, those are low power desktop units and I put them in a file server. I deserved that one.
Synology specifically warns against using WD Greens. My bad experience with 4 of them in a non-RAID JBOD array confirms this warning.
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that HGST's tend to be best
Correct. But given HGST's market share is on the higher side of fuck all it doesn't matter. Of the two most common brands people generally happy recommend WD.
but I recognize the wildcard that solidstate represents and would never dream of trusting either drive with anything important.
Except reliability data has shown there's zero reason to worry about SSDs. They aren't a wildcard, and haven't been since the OCZ Vector debacle. I get it, 2023 is shit. The world is burning, Russia is starting a war, America is looking to join African countries in political corruptness. But it's not all bad, and pretending like it's 2008 isn't doing y
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As to Toshiba HDDs (external USB), I have had to destroy two of them physically just a few months back. Turns out they messed SMR up so badly that putting an ext3 on the drives completely kills performance, with write-rates below 1MB/s. Even a simple linear overwrite (raw drive) with zeros would have taken 40 (!) days after data was on the drives. As I had confidential customer data on them, I did physically destroy them. Toshiba is not what it used to be. That said, I will not get any SMR drives ever again
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Indeed. And they are not even noticeably cheaper.
I like intel drives. (Score:2)
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I've had the same 120GB intel 510 in all the various iterations of my PC since 2011. The thing is a champ.
That's because, at that capacity, it has Flash cells the size of dinner plates.
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The quantum mechanics behind fitting a dinner plate inside a 2.5" drive must be mind-bending.
I didn't specify the size of the plate.
I wonder.... (Score:2)
I ppurchased a couple of "Sand Disk" SD cards for my camera back in January. I put both in my camera (Nikon D7100) formatted both and started taking pictures. Both got to ~50% full then both just died. Stopped working. When I took them out of the camera and put them in my computer, the 64GB SD cards were now 32GB SD cards that could not be read, written, formatted or mounted. Wonder if the same people hawing the fake SD cards are hawing fake SSD drives.