Western Digital releases firmware to address SanDisk drive failure and data loss

[Canon Rumors Guy]

Western Digital has had a rough go with the SanDisk line of portable hard drives, with the latest issue causing drive failure and/or complete data loss. Western Digital has also been sued in California over this issue. Affected SanDisk Drives If you have one of these drives, it’s in your best interest to head over

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[bergstrom]

what are the best ones out there then?

 

[koenkooi]

Yay, my 1TB version is not impacted according to the serial!

 

[neuroanatomist]

what are the best ones out there then?

I've got a bunch of Samsung T7 portable SSDs, some 'regular' and some 'shield' (the ruggedized ones) in 1-2 TB sizes (they now have up to 4 TB), and they have performed perfectly.

 

[koenkooi]

what are the best ones out there then?

Personally, for things I care about I get a thunderbolt enclosure and insert an M.2 drive. Since my desktop and laptop are both Macs, I get very good performance, much better than pure USB drives.

 

[Antono Refa]

Had three SanDisk thumb drives fail (one out of the packaging), so I'm buying other brands', mostly Corsair.

Now this? Maybe I should stop buying their SSD portable drives as well.

 

[tron]

I have 2 WDBAGF0040BGY 4TB disks but serial numbers check OK.

 

[Lt Colonel]

I have four. Two of the standard and two "pro" versions. Fortunately, according to the website none are "impacted" when I checked the serial numbers. Unfortunately, I have lost confidence in them and have purchased a Crucial and a Samsung for my upcoming RMNP elk rut trip. This certainly creates a conundrum for me to have invested in 10 TB of portable storage that hasn't given any problems and now be afraid to use it. I think I'll continue to carry them and use them as a third backup to see if they fail. Not sure what that'll prove, but it beats throwing them in a drawer and doing nothing with them.

 

[LSXPhotog]

We had 3 SanDisk SSD failures this year. This is a widespread issue and should not be downplayed with how much this has tarnished SanDisk’s reputation in the data storage space. The company that performed the recovery on my 4TB said they’re getting hundreds of them and they (LC Technology) are the company that developed SanDisk’s recovery software. The failure is from a faulty controller that essentially loses where it put your files on the solid state drive. So it has no idea where to find them and will begin to dismount randomly - ultimately becoming unreadable by MacOS or Windows. This is triggered when large amounts of data are written to the drive at one like during a backup sequence or typical 30-100GB folder transfer of something like photos or videos.

LC Technology has a pretty successful method to recover the files and were able to save 90-95 of what I had on my drive. The process lost my file naming convention (they adopt generic numeric names) my folder structure, and some files were permanently corrupted, but we got back a lot.

I’m currently using ONLY Samsung and Crucial. The marketing agencies I work for have both black listed SanDisk and appear to also be using SanDisk and Crucial. (Why don’t you just use a housing blah blah blah? Because I’m always on the road traveling and can expense out a quick Best Buy or B&H overnight delivery. These drives get retired after they’re full and I move on)

I will never buy a SanDisk product again because of how they responded. No help at all and liquidation of existing inventory they know is faulty. Failures happen. But to know you have a faulty product on the market and not offer free recovery services? They were providing replacement drives THAT ALSO FAILED!! They actually gave some people replacement drives from the product sequence that had the same exact problem.

 

[Bishop80]

...This is triggered when large amounts of data are written to the drive at one like during a backup sequence or typical 30-100GB folder transfer of something like photos or videos.
...
I will never buy a SanDisk product again because of how they responded. No help at all and liquidation of existing inventory they know is faulty. Failures happen. But to know you have a faulty product on the market and not offer free recovery services? They were providing replacement drives THAT ALSO FAILED!! They actually gave some people replacement drives from the product sequence that had the same exact problem.

This was my experience as well with the Extreme 4TB SSD. Original and replacement had the same issue.
When I saw the patch, I confirmed my S/N was affected and applied it.
However, even after a full repartition and format, new data copied to the drive eventually causes device errors until it slows to a crawl. Large files seemed to be the worst offenders.
So ok, maybe the data won't corrupt anymore, but the drive becomes unusable with this new firmware.

I'm now going through the RMA process to get a new SSD (this would be the third one).