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Data Storage

SanDisk Extreme SSDs Are 'Worthless,' Multiple Lawsuits Against WD Say 52

Posted by msmash from the mounting-trouble dept.
Last week we wrote about a lawsuit against Western Digital that alleged that the firm's solid state drive didn't live up to its marketing promises. More lawsuits have been filed against the company since. ArsTechnica: On Thursday, two more lawsuits were filed against Western Digital over its SanDisk Extreme series and My Passport portable SSDs. That brings the number of class-action complaints filed against Western Digital to three in two days. In May, Ars Technica reported about customer complaints that claimed SanDisk Extreme SSDs were abruptly wiping data and becoming unmountable. Ars senior editor Lee Hutchinson also experienced this problem with two Extreme SSDs. Western Digital, which owns SanDisk, released a firmware update in late May, saying that currently shipping products weren't impacted. But the company didn't mention customer complaints of lost data, only that drives could "unexpectedly disconnect from a computer."

Further, last week The Verge claimed a replacement drive it received after the firmware update still wiped its data and became unreadable, and there are some complaints on Reddit pointing to recent problems with Extreme drives. All three cases filed against Western Digital this week seek class-action certification (Ars was told it can take years for a judge to officially state certification and that cases may proceed with class-wide resolutions possibly occurring before official certification). 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." He added that defect cases are "ripe for class treatment."
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SanDisk Extreme SSDs Are 'Worthless,' Multiple Lawsuits Against WD Say More

SanDisk Extreme SSDs Are 'Worthless,' Multiple Lawsuits Against WD Say

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  • I worked in computer repair services formerly. They absolutely are. The only company that beats them on failure rates, with a sample size personally of several hundred of each brand and model over the years, is Silicon Power. They have double digit failure percentages. PNY was a bit of a train wreck and so was Adata but nowhere near Silicon Power with a close second being Sandisk.

    • I only buy drives from Samsung or Intel because the chips come from their own fabs.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bobby ( 109046 )

        I like your thinking, but I've heard anecdotal stories of them also having high failure rates. How about Micron?

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Life2Death ( 801594 )

          I buy a ton of SSDs for work, and personal use (homelabs) and have had the following die:
          6 intel drives (8MB bug on 4 of these, most otherwise just crapped the bed)
          1 WD 770 1TB (took a whole system out - must have shorted out the PCIe bus or something wild)
          1 Crucial SATA SSD (1TB) - DOA
          1 Lite-On (OEM HP Drive) die - this one slowed to a crawl first, and let us back up data and then died
          2 Samsung (though I purchase a TON of these) - They technically are DOA but firmware updates and a total wipe and reformat

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by bobby ( 109046 )

            Thank you, that's very useful.

            I have a good friend who is a photographer, as well as his fiancee. They take terabytes of pictures pretty much anytime anywhere. He also has a Black Magic video camera, audio recorders, etc. Needless to say, he's bought hundreds of SSDs over the years. He said the only brand he never had trouble with was SanDisk, but that was pre-WD of course.

            I've bought several of the MicroCenter "Inland" (or whatever they are) drives, had no problems so far.

            This very laptop has a 1TB San

          • 6 intel drives (8MB bug on 4 of these, most otherwise just crapped the bed)

            Same experience here. Intel should just sell those as 8MB drives from the get-go and cut out the random wait before the drives turn themselves into that.

        • I like your thinking, but I've heard anecdotal stories of them also having high failure rates.

          Every time there's a story on /. about drive reliability, everybody has their anecdotes about how $BRAND fails most often in their experience. The reality is: all drives eventually fail. You're supposed to be making regular backups no matter what.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by bobby ( 109046 )

            Yup, we all know that. What medium do you suggest for backups?

            • Well, I have an old Epson needle printer.
              If it has not ink band set in, it punches holes into the paper.
              I guess you could use it to kind of modern punch card endless paper drum :P

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by bobby ( 109046 )

                Very amusing, yet could actually work.
                I also have a couple of "needle" printers (that I haven't used in years but you never know...).
                Bake in some ECC. Hmmm. I wonder how many bytes you could get in a page- printing in full graphics mode, no blank spaces horizontally or vertically.

                • It was meant to be funny.

                  BUT: some guys did that in the 90s or even 80s.

                  They used a paper stripe, thumb wide very long paper stripe. Like you see in old movies for Morse Code telegrams.

                  The holes where quite big, like 1mm in diameter or so.

                  The error correction was basically build into "the byte" - imagine a 3 x 3 raster of holes. I think the raster was bigger, probably 5 x 5 or so.

                  The punching process was quite straight forward.

                  The reader was looking like a SIM card, two metal plates divided each into an app

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by edwdig ( 47888 )

          Samsung drives have been the most reliable for quite a while. Both in terms how low failure rate, and avoiding data errors.

          A lot of drives cheat to get better benchmark scores by ignoring flush commands. A flush command is supposed to clear the pending write queue before indicating that it's complete. Many SSDs ignore the command and just immediately signal that it's complete, regardless of queue status. This destroys any software attempts at data integrity, meaning you end up with corrupt data in the event

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by bobby ( 109046 )

            I hadn't heard of this, but thank you, good to know (yet depressing).

            I was having tons of ongoing problems with my pre-WD SanDisk 1TB SSD, including files literally disappearing, tons of chkdsk errors (only run in "recovery console" / unmounted mode).

            I was making sure TRIM was enabled, even ran the SanDisk utility to force TRIM. Never lost power- always proper shutdown. No SMART errors or problems. Drive passes several different media scan utilities.

            A couple of months ago I finally removed AHCI and since

  • Do not trust any product that has "Extreme" in the name. :)
    • In this case the "Extreme" is for "Your data is "Extreme"-ly likely to be corrupted." But seriously, "Extreme" is so 1990s.
    • I remember having some RAM go bad and driving over to a now defunct computer store to get some more PC2100 DDR. It was all locked up in a case and a sales guy made his way over. The timings and other salient details were on the shelf tag, easy to read. "What's the difference between this PC2100 and this other one here other than the word 'Extreme" and $50?" "Not a thing, sir!"

  • When companies have situations like this, how they react can make or break the company.

    Back in 2015, a century-old regional Ice Cream company sold contaminated ice cream [cdc.gov]. It faced a recall, a long shut-down, criminal charges, and more. One of its now-former executives tried to cover it up and faced federal criminal charges [fda.gov] (he eventually reached a plea deal [foodsafetynews.com] without jail time).

    BUT - and this is important: The company admitted fault, took steps to make sure it never happened again, and cooperated with auth

  • I have dozens of SanDisk SSDs... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by AutoTrix ( 8918325 ) on Monday August 21, 2023 @12:22PM (#63785570)
    I have dozens of these SanDisk SSDs and haven't had any problems with them for what it's worth. Do they die? Eventually everything dies.... Do we practice proper Backup procedures and RMA drives when I warranty... Yes to both. There is almost no appreciable cost to the end user that's not inherent with any possible hardware failure. No one guarantees their product, they just warrant it. Everything is essentially sold as 'use at your own risk' unless you sign a contract stating otherwise. As long as they are replacing them under warranty and do nothing funny there, I don't see how this will go forward based on the merit of they die and make data unaccessible.

    • Re:I have dozens of SanDisk SSDs... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Monday August 21, 2023 @12:57PM (#63785750)

      The complaint and lawsuit is based on WD knowingly selling products with defects.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

        ... which, I should note, is no different than IBM, Microsoft, Samsung, etc. etc. have done for decades.

        If you've ever been involved at the corporate level with identifying a hardware defect in another company's hardware, it's all about CYA and legal risk mitigation first and foremost. The companies will deny a problem exists until a fix is available, if at all possible, particularly if they were notified of said issue.

        The difference is they were caught with a documented trail of proof that it was known, an

    • My buddy and I have these for temp storage and we dont really take care of them, but have had them well over a year without any issues.

    • Re:I have dozens of SanDisk SSDs... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Monday August 21, 2023 @02:47PM (#63786142) Homepage

      The SanDisk Extreme portable SSD is just an OEM WD Blue NVMe drive mated to a USB-to-NVMe adapter. It's even possible to "shuck" the drive, though with how cheap NVMe drives have become lately it doesn't make economic sense to do so.

      The WD Blue NVMe series actually has pretty good reviews (and I also personally own a few of them and haven't had any issues), which leads me to believe that it's probably the USB-to-NVMe adapter that's actually failing.

      • The SanDisk Extreme portable SSD is just an OEM WD Blue NVMe drive mated to a USB-to-NVMe adapter.

        I see that is how they advertise it, but why? Why not use a SATA M.2 drive with a SATA to USB adapter. SATA is already faster than USB.

        • I see that is how they advertise it, but why? Why not use a SATA M.2 drive with a SATA to USB adapter. SATA is already faster than USB.

          Errr no, not at all, not even close.

          SATA III tops out at 6Gb/s with overhead you typically see a max theoretical transfer rate of 1/10th: 600MB/s
          The Extreme Pro has a 20Gb/s USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 interface, and the real world benchmark of the drive shows it hitting 1.8GB/s to 2GB/s depending on workload.

          SATA is a bottleneck of USB both in theory and in practice.

    • Re:I have dozens of SanDisk SSDs... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Tuesday August 22, 2023 @08:55AM (#63787646)

      Everything is essentially sold as 'use at your own risk' unless you sign a contract stating otherwise.

      Not true. Goods are sold in many countries with a minimum legal expectation of performance and not meeting those opens manufacturers to liability.

      No one guarantees their product, they just warrant it.

      Everyone guarantees their product. That comes out in marketing terms. Even in the good ol' US of Fuck the Consumer A you're still entitled to receive the product marketed to you. And you can't make it to the second word of the first sentence of WD's Sandisk Extreme Pro's website without seeing the word "robust".

      Okay in fairness on the English website you need to read the entire first sentence to get to the words "rugged, dependable storage solution." But if it isn't any of those then they are potentially liable in a lawsuit.

      • That's a warranty on the product. They do not offer a guarantee of performance towards things the product is used for. A car is warrtied to not catch fire. But they don't insure the stuff in your car... Your vehicle insurance usually has this covered. Same with storage.

  • The Verge doesn't know the difference between a pair of tweezers and a god damned zip tie, who cares what they claim... its probably wrong

  • What SSD's can users actually trust? IMO I trusted them for all my micro ssd uses for my Pi's and other things. So for each category what are the goto brands now?
    * the little micros
    * the ones that replace hard drives (sata/m2/etc)
    * thumb
    * external hard drives

    • What SSD's can users actually trust?

      I generally take the approach that SSDs that are sold by the companies that make the underlying silicon in their own fabs are more likely to be reliable.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      I have made good experiences with a lot of Samsung NVME/SATA SSDs and some microSDs.

      Thumb-drives generally suck these days due to really low write speeds when you write more data. I do have one Transcend 128GB that actually sustains 80MB/s write speed, but I also have thrown away several USB3.0 ones because I cannot wait a day because they write at 5MB/s after a little while.

      External HDDs, I can only recommend to stay away from SMR, which is all of the prepackaged ones, again due to low write speeds. I had

  • They have _negative_ worth. First, you pay for them and second, you get fucked over. I have a "never buy again" list for such cretins.

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