Western Digital Sued Over Claims of Data-Trashing SanDisk, My Passport SSDs (theregister.com) 38
Western Digital was sued on Tuesday on behalf of a California resident who claims the solid state drive he bought from the manufacturer was defective and that the storage slinger shipped kit that didn't live up to its marketing promises. The Register reports: The complaint [PDF], filed in federal court in San Jose, California, where the storage giant is based, alleges the Western Digital SanDisk 2TB Extreme Pro SSD purchased by plaintiff Nathan Krum in May for $180 failed because of an undisclosed flaw, which also affects SanDisk Extreme Pro, Extreme Portable, Extreme Pro Portable, and WD My Passport SSD models since January 2023, it's claimed. The complaint [PDF], filed in federal court in San Jose, California, where the storage giant is based, alleges the Western Digital SanDisk 2TB Extreme Pro SSD purchased by plaintiff Nathan Krum in May for $180 failed because of an undisclosed flaw, which also affects SanDisk Extreme Pro, Extreme Portable, Extreme Pro Portable, and WD My Passport SSD models since January 2023, it's claimed.
The complaint asserts Western Digital customers "have widely reported drive failures and data loss." Krum, in his filing, believes Western Digital is aware of the problem and not doing enough about it. "The SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD hard drives, which are also sold under the WD My Passport brand, have a firmware issue that causes them to disconnect or become unreadable by computers," he claimed, adding that his drive was among those that stopped working as expected.
It is alleged the drives can break down in various ways, including randomly disconnecting from their host, which could result in information not being saved correctly or file-system corruption. In any case, people find they can no longer access their stored documents, making the SSDs worthless and useless, it is claimed. [...] Chris Cantrell, an attorney at Doyle Lowther LLP who is representing the plaintiffs, told The Register it's not yet clear how many SanDisk SSDs experienced data loss though there are more than a few people who share his client's experience. "While Western Digital appears to have attempted to fix the issue with a firmware update, it does not appear to have fixed the issue," Cantrell added. "This is what prompted us to file this lawsuit on behalf of affected SanDisk SSD purchasers. We anticipate adding additional named plaintiffs from other states over the next few weeks." The complaint alleges breach of contract, violation of consumer protection law, and misleading advertising, among other claims, and seeks damages, legal costs, and other relief.
The complaint asserts Western Digital customers "have widely reported drive failures and data loss." Krum, in his filing, believes Western Digital is aware of the problem and not doing enough about it. "The SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD hard drives, which are also sold under the WD My Passport brand, have a firmware issue that causes them to disconnect or become unreadable by computers," he claimed, adding that his drive was among those that stopped working as expected.
It is alleged the drives can break down in various ways, including randomly disconnecting from their host, which could result in information not being saved correctly or file-system corruption. In any case, people find they can no longer access their stored documents, making the SSDs worthless and useless, it is claimed. [...] Chris Cantrell, an attorney at Doyle Lowther LLP who is representing the plaintiffs, told The Register it's not yet clear how many SanDisk SSDs experienced data loss though there are more than a few people who share his client's experience. "While Western Digital appears to have attempted to fix the issue with a firmware update, it does not appear to have fixed the issue," Cantrell added. "This is what prompted us to file this lawsuit on behalf of affected SanDisk SSD purchasers. We anticipate adding additional named plaintiffs from other states over the next few weeks." The complaint alleges breach of contract, violation of consumer protection law, and misleading advertising, among other claims, and seeks damages, legal costs, and other relief.
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1. he is not effectively pardoned in the State of Georgia, where pardons are not statutorily available until 5 years AFTER serving your sentence, and pardons are granted by an enforced-bipartisan commission instead of the governor, due to a 1940s Georgia governor literally selling pardons and the predictable legislation that would follow such a revelation.
2. Do not mistake Republican primary polls with reality. Yes, he likely wins the nomination. And since losing in 2020, he's done a whole lot of shit to
I have had good luck with the smaller models... (Score:2)
For the 512 GB and the 1TB models of the SanDisk Extreme Pro, I've had decent luck with them. They have AES encryption, where you can quickly erase all the data on it [1], UASP support, so I can have Linux be able to trim the mounted filesystems, work well in areas that kill hard disks, and quietly to the job, be it a boot drive for Raspberry Pis, a log drive for my router, a backup drive for my laptop, etc.
Hopefully they can make a revised model that doesn't need a SSD flashing, and some obvious change in
Yeah, get an external SSD drive for backups ... (Score:2)
I don't want to also have to foot legal bills of random goobers who can't be bothered to backup their shit
Yeah, people should get external portable drives so they can do periodic backups. At SSD speeds, assuming USB 3.1, it's fairly fast. The drives are inexpensive here days. ... Oh, wait, ..., never mind.
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You do realize the drives in question are meant for backing stuff up, right?
So if your backups fail because of shitty hardware that randomly takes a union break in the middle of streaming file writes, your backups are:
A) perfectly fine
B) worthless
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Yup - Same Issue (Score:2)
I stopped using SanDisk some time ago because of this issue. They were a brand I trusted for CF and SD cards, but their SSD drives, for me, have always failed horribly and irrevocably leaving my drives unreadable. I think I went through two or three before I just stopped using SanDisk and moved to another brand. I didn't know they were owned by Western Digital - should have looked that up, based on my experience with other WD backup drives over the years that all seemed to have rather high failure rates on
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Lately, I've seen a bunch of clickbait headlines about this issue, but all the anecdotes seem to go, "This guy lost all his data on one out of N drives; Lots of other people have too (never any references for those)".
I'm not saying this isn't an issue, but it sure sounds like someone an his lawyer got a bug up their butt about this and are just carpetbombing sites to troll up some pressure on WD/Sandisk. I'm not at all surprised WD is silent on this - there is an active lawsuit out there trying to turn into
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The SD cards have gone downhill too. I've had several of them fail in the last few years, and I'm not using that many of them. I now buy Samsung SSDs and SD cards, and HGST HDDs...
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Hah, this is exactly what I've been doing too, after having 8 WD hard disks fail on me out of 10 in less than a year a while back.
Western Digital is garbage, and has been for some time. If I'm buying solid state, it's probably Samsung. And if I'm buying rotating rust, it's going to be HGST or Toshiba.
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Vote parent up: it's true. HGST is WD, unless I'm missing something...?
By 2018, the HGST brand had been phased out, with its remaining products now marketed under the Western Digital name. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Re: Western Digital and SanDisk SSDs: The Digital (Score:2)
I couldn't help but notice you have no personal experience with the issue, you just felt the need to spew a dozen or more paragraphs regurgitation other people's complaints.
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... about as useful as an underwater hairdryer ...
As a scuba diver on the west coast, an underwater hairdryer would be useful. The warm water it produces welcome. :-)
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Say you're working for the plaintiff without saying that you're working for the plaintiff.
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This looks like it was written with AI.
"Comment on this summary, and use a lot of idioms."
It's worse than you think (Score:2)
Pepsi and Coke both rot your teeth. (Score:2)
There are precious few alternatives and they aren't better.
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Alternatives to what? Western Digital? There's loads of alternatives in every single product segment they serve. And most of them, in fact, are better. And by quite a bit.
See? I can make unsubstantiated claims without any evidence as well. Except mine happen to correlate with easily observable reality with a simple Google search.
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I haven't purchased a Western Digital hard drive in years. It is not because WD drives fail more than other drives. In fact I have a bunch of Seagate drives fail. It seems that the drives that Seagate made shortly after the big flood that they had in Thailand were bad. However, I still will buy Seagate drives over WD. The reason is because of the way the drives fail. Seagate drives get sick before they die. They will do things like randomly go offline and require a power cycle to bring back to life.
Warranty (Score:2)
There are a variety of warranty claims being made in the filling, but the primary claim is implied warranty of merchantability. This is an important one, that I don't think most people know about.
It applies to any product being sold, and can only be negated if a product is being sold "as-is," or used. Basically, when you sell somebody something, there is an implied warranty that it will, at the very least, do what it's supposed to do. If you buy a lawnmower and it doesn't cut grass, even if there is no clai
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Most warranties that I read deny "implied warranty of merchantability." But, they also have language saying some states do not allow that. Which states? How many? No one knows. Well, at least I don't know.
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Most warranties that I read deny "implied warranty of merchantability." But, they also have language saying some states do not allow that. Which states?
To further complicate things, some states that do not have laws banning such language, still have implied warranties even if the warranty claims it does not, via various court rulings or ancillary contract law.
It's tricky, but that's the whole point of the "implied" warranty. If you are saying it's a lawn mower, then it should cut lawns. Saying you don't really mean it's a lawn mower in the warranty doesn't negate what's on the box, especially if you otherwise claim it has an explicit warranty anyways. Lawy
SD Submitter Posts Shit (Score:2)
... the storage slinger shipped kit...
What kind of gibberish is this?
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It's a copy / paste from the article, written for a UK publication, using UK slang.
Yep, pretty serious crap (Score:2)
Marketed as a "professional" and superior product, no less. Does not get more misleading. They probably produce their firmware in China and do not do any real testing.