Western Digital, SanDisk Extreme SSDs don’t store data safely, lawsuit says

Is it just me or has SanDisk always been kind of sketchy?

I remember hating them when I was using their SD cards on my Nintendo Wii... I had a lot of those little things fail on me.

They were always the cheapest available USB drives, and it always made me go "why? quality?"

I've used so many of their memory cards, flash drives, not much in the way of SSDs. I've had only one fail on me, that I can remember. I don't want to say it's not happening. But I also wonder how many fakes ppl received, damaging SD's name. Either way, aside from this latest spat, they've made pretty good products. There was another period years ago I felt they dropped the ball, can't remember why, but otherwise generally good.
- Same here. I've only stopped using their stuff when it was already too small for me. Their CruzerBlade flash drives are my favorite flash drives thanks to their fast random access. I installed Linux Mint on 1 of them and it runs fairly well. Much faster than HDD unless you're doing large file transfers. Obviously this greatly limits their lifespan, flash drives can't handle so many writes.
  I just replaced a SanDisk MicroSD card in my phone for Samsung one, and I regret it. Moving many small files is noticeably slower.
  
  On the other hand there's Philips. Sequential I/O gave me better results than the SanDisk drive, but that thing isn't even useful as installation disk. That thing is just awfully slow. How they managed to make a flash drive slower than DVD, I don't understand. But hopefully it's just faulty unit that I have.
I have used SanDisk cards for years, without issue. They are a huge manufacturer of flash memory, which is why their prices were always good. It is certainly possible and even probable that the quality has gone down. All kinds of companies lower their product's quality and reliability to make them cheaper to increase profits.
- Yup, they've been the reliable, fast brand for me for SD cards for years. I'm not going to buy their SSDs, but I'll buy their SD cards any day of the week.
If you want good and reliable storage, it's either Samsung or Kingston for me, in this order. (Kingston it's a bit worse but also cheaper)
- I've never had a problem with Kingston, been using the same 1GB drive for over 15 years now and still works perfectly as my live Linux setup. Bought another 64GB one few years back as well.
  
  I also have an over 10 years old Seagate (I guess Samsung now?) 500GB HDD that has been through a couple enclosures but still works perfectly.
  
  I wouldn't deviate from those 2 brands.
I had many USB drives and SD cards from them, one actually died after 5 years in my phone and it's not actually fully dead. My Pi runs from them, no problems there.

The complaint is seeking class-action certification on behalf of people who bought a 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, or 4TB SanDisk Extreme Pro, SanDisk Extreme, or Western Digital My Passport SSD that was "designed, manufactured, distributed, promoted and/or sold" since January 2023.

Looks like this is for people who've purchased the drives since January 2023. So does it not affect people from before?

Found a PDF of the complaint from another article, which says "since at least January 2023" on page 15, so, take that as you will.
- I wonder if that suggests that hardware made prior to that data doesn't suffer from the same flaws? Or if it's just an arbitrary cut off they decided on for the affected customers they would include in the lawsuit.
Here’s the original article from Ars Technica last May. IIRC this has the details on which drives are suspect.
This is the important question.

Damn, WD's been my go-to brand for drives for years.

Yes please use seagate hahaha 🍿
- Seagate is fine. They had some notoriously bad models, but on average, they're pretty similar to WD, at least in the HDD space.
  
  For SSDs, the more important thing is that NAND tech, not the label on the device, and the same brand can carry high quality and low quality NAND chips.
Brand is mostly irrelevant with storage devices in my experience... It's usually just a matter of luck.

Unless we're discussing the Quantum Bigfoot...

We abandoned using SanDisk after WD merged the G-DRIVE into them. This particular model we've seen like half a dozen fail over 6 months as well as 3 failures from their 22TB HDD Pro series which is what replaced G-DRIVE. Their quality has really plummeted.

Someone should get one of these and dd copy all 0xdeadbeefs to the disk

Then dd it all off and confirm no corruption and it truly is the size it says.

Seen firmwares of shitty sd cards and drives lie about their storage capacity

Here is a 15GB card, btw it only has 9GB.
- The issue with this is the difference between GB (1,000,000,000 bytes) and GiB (1,073,741,824 bytes) https://massive.io/file-transfer/gb-vs-gib-whats-the-difference/
  
  HDD manufacturers use GB, which is a metric measurement, because its better for marketing while computers use GiB, which is a binary measurement. So people think they're buying 15GiB but in reality they're buying 13.5GiB marketed as 15GB

Damn that sucks, I have one of those extreme 4tb drives. I've had it for more than a year with no problems tho. It's such an awesome form factor for such a large drive. I have three partitions on it. One FAT32 for music that I can play on my phone and the other two are ext4 with movies and TV for the Raspberry Pi. On a related note, why the fuck can't android recognize an external ext4 drive. Like the entire internal file structure is ext4.

Ikr, still boggles my mind, it's like Linux without the Linux

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Amid ongoing pressure to address claims that its SanDisk Extreme SSDs are still erasing data and becoming unmountable despite a firmware fix, Western Digital is facing a lawsuit over its storage drives.

Complaints about the drives littered SanDisk's forums and Reddit (examples here, here, here, and here) for at least four months before Western Digital released a firmware fix in late May.

Nathan Krum filed a lawsuit [PDF] against Western Digital in a federal court in San Jose, California, on Wednesday, as spotted by The Register.

The complaint says Western Digital "engaged in a scheme to mislead consumers" about Extreme and My Passport SSDs and that both series of drives are still defective after the firmware update, "according to reports from individuals who installed this fix."

Western Digital's current product page advertises Extreme drives as fit for photographers, and it's pushed My Passport as suitable for creators and businesses.

The SMR and drive size scandals resulted in class-action lawsuits, with the former reportedly ending in a $2.7 million settlement and the latter with Western Digital compensating affected parties with free backup and recovery software worth $30.

I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Damn, I have one of these that I use a lot for work, it's been pretty reliable so far, but this makes me think I should get something else to replace it...

Same here -- had one at a previous job and thought it was great. Got another one for my current job, and just bought another one for my Dad. I think the takeaway here is what we've always known though, which is to never trust your storage solutions. As long as there's multiple copies, I think it's okay to continue using them.
I have one as well. Did the firmware update a few months ago when it would periodically just start skipping or stop responding (I have my music collection on it). Haven't had an issue since.

Now what the hell did they think was gonna happen when they shipped defective drives? Did they really think people wouldn't notice their bytes vanishing into the ether and their drives dropping off the bus?

This is unfortunate. I just bought one a couple months ago but haven’t even opened it yet.

Is there any data that backs up the claims of most likely tech-illiterate consumers?

most likely tech-illiterate consumers

You know you really are an elitist for someone who walks around complaining about others using "classist" language.

You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole.
- It's a statement of fact. A casual consumer deletes a file, and then thinks that the computer lost their file. You can look at any series of IT complaints and the most common resolution is "user education." So if there is indeed a class-action lawsuit, then during discovery they will need to produce data that shows that these specific drives have some sort of defect or obvious issue that is out of the norm for other drives. I'd like to see that data.

I just bought ones of these on discount at Costco in July… Are they fixed? Can they even be trusted? Ugh.

Just like any other drive, assume they could fail at any moment, and have backups.
- I’m not worried about losing data, I’m worried the drive won’t work when I need it to copy new data.
Check the model number. We bought ours from Costco as well, so I checked ours based off the article Ars Technica published last week. Our SDDs were older.
- I guess mine is old too; SDSSDE50-1T00. The Support page for the disconnect issue lists it as unaffected and no firmware updates available.
  
  It's getting difficult to trust these companies though. The entire line of Samsung Evo 870 500GB drives I bought at work are failing early, I just passed 11/20 Dead or Dying. Then I bought some Western Digital Blue drives as a replacement that had 65K reviews on Amazon only to find out they might also be lemons. Quality Control has gone to shit.