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
- SanDisk Extreme Portable 4TB (SDSSDE61-4T00)
- SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable 4TB (SDSSDE81-4T00)
- SanDisk Extreme Pro 2TB (SDSSDE81-2T00)
- SanDisk Extreme Pro 1TB (SDSSDE81-1T00)
- WD My Passport 4TB (WDBAGF0040BGY)
If you have one of these drives, it's in your best interest to head over to Western Digital and use their tool to see if your specific drive is affected by these issues.
Check your serial number at Western Digital
Source: Western Digital via The Digital Picture & ZDNet
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Now this? Maybe I should stop buying their SSD portable drives as well.
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.
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).