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I'm really furious at this. I bought a bunch in the past two years as that's my go-to brands for my backup solutions. And in the past week, had to buy different brands to diversify.
My main takeaway:
Don't buy SanDisk. Don't buy Western Digital.
I don't care if it's only a few models. I'm not risking my data.
Every drive in my computer: NVME, SSD, and HDD is a WD drive. 🫣
So far these issues only apply to these specific SSDs ... fingers crossed it stays that way, because like you I've got a number of WD HDDs in my life.
WD got in trouble not too long ago for deceptively marketing shingled drives as conventional. Back to back issues like this is going to leave a lasting impression on the kinds of people who buy drives.
I agree, I don’t buy WD drives any more. But I don’t want to replace the ones I already have unless it’s necessary.
"so far" is the operative word.
You really don't want to discover you're suddenly part of the 2024 list of drives that also are corrupt.
I think the key thing here is that older drives you already own are probably ok. At least if they're a year old or so.
And frankly, your data should never be in question. Short of a drive failure where the whole drive dies, which would require data recovery services, your data should be safely stored. IMO that's the premise of data storage; and bluntly, it's the only job it has... To store, keep, and retrieve data when asked.
If it cannot do that, or has any nontrivial risk of being unable to do that, then it's not worth the plastics that make up the case. Unless you're using the drive as a temp/scrub/whatever disk, it's unusable in my opinion.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In May, Ars Technica reported about customer complaints that claimed SanDisk Extreme SSDs were abruptly wiping data and becoming unmountable.
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."
Perrin and Bayerl's complaint mentions the 2TB Extreme, which Western Digital hasn't officially confirmed as an affected device.
Jafri's complaint says he bought an Extreme Pro (capacity not specified) because he was on an extended van trip and needed storage for drone footage, photos, and travel mementos.
The cases seek restitution, including damages, and for Western Digital to stop selling the affected drives until they're fixed or the problems are fully disclosed on all labels, packaging, and advertising.
Sloss told Ars that challenges of the case might include establishing how frequently drives failed after Western Digital shared its May firmware update.
The original article contains 771 words, the summary contains 168 words. Saved 78%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Me with 2 WD HDDs and 2 Sandisk SD card: this is fine
The complaints are only about a specific line of external ssds. You're fine.
Back in the day, working with WD was a nightmare. The spinning HDs never came with a keyed IDE cable. It must have saved them $.0001 per HD shipped. If you accidentally put the cable in backwards, it not only burned out the logic board on the WD HD, it would also burn out any other drives on the cable. And the IDE controller on the motherboard. Now it is easy to remember how to do it right. Install the power cable and then make sure the red wire on the power cable was next to the red wire (pin 1) on the IDE cable. But if you rush or make an assumption, that was an expensive mistake.
This sounds like maybe early 90's possibly without voltage regulators at the molex connector. I've been doing this a very long time and have never heard of this.
I've thought WD was sleezy ever since they secretly switched from CMR drives to SMR drives, including in their NAS products (for which SMR drives are particularly unsuitable). So this doesn't surprise me at all.
People need to stop buying WD drives and buy Seagate instead. They had their own SMR scandal, but at least they never put them in their NAS drives.
From someone who isn't tech savvy this sounds like star trek jargon
Ehhhh, you aren't far off. Star Trek jargon was literally made up by the actors and writers, at least according to some of the original cast, with them mimicking the technical jargon that their friends in technical careers, especially electrical engineers, were using at the time.
I am tech savvy and I've never heard of SMR or CMR. After reading up on it, I don't think it really matters. SMR is newer technology, and is maybe more reliable in the short term, but the drives fail faster because of the extra wear and tear, and the drives are slower than CMR.
https://history-computer.com/smr-vs-cmr-hard-drives/
Edit: I missed that SMR is supposed to be worse, despite being newer. So I guess WD is putting slower and sooner failing drives out to save a buck.
I used to buy Seagate, but they broke twice or thrice as fast as WD. But that was 8-10 years ago. Are they better now?
I've been using ironwolf/exos drives for years without any issues. The 3TB fiasco runs deep and people need to just let it go.
Seagate drives should never be used outside of a RAID because the failure rate is so high.
WD is absolutely abusing their power as the only reliable spinning HDD company left, but I have no choice but to continue to buy their increasing overpriced drives because there is no alternative.
Just a reminder of the 3-2-1 backup model.
Semi important things are backed up to my home server. Super important stuff is also stored on a big name cloud service.
Also, don't forget paper exists. For smaller documents, it could be worth printing them, and putting them in a water/fire resistant safe.
Also, don’t forget paper exists. For smaller documents, it could be worth printing them, and putting them in a water/fire resistant safe.
Before paper, and somewhere in-between the digital and analogue, maybe go weird with discs or magnetic tape drives (if you're really into your electromagnetic data storage)?
And for the sillier side to this: don't forget to laser etch the most important records in stone. Don't think it's worth the trouble? Wouldn't have some of our ancient records if they weren't literally carved in stone, so...Incidentally, would anyone happen to know of any personal robotic stone engraving tools one could get?
Would be fun to pass in some text and let a machine go to work on some stray stones.
Serious question:
How do you guys handle backups and how often do you do it?
I know I'm not doing particularly well. Once in a blue moon I'll copy over files from my main drive onto my secondary drive. But I'm not doing anything fancy - literally copy the Documents and a few other folders and that's it. I'm not compressing anything. I'm still keeping that secondary drive connected to my PC so if I got a virus, all that data could be infected. I also store some files on my Gdrive and OneDrive but those have long since filled up and I rarely bother to go through them to delete what I didn't need anymore.
I feel whatever backup tools Windows has built in are probably worthless, but then again, I could be totally wrong on that.
Curious how real people handle this.
You are on a trip to disaster. Trust me, I do this for a living. One day you're going to have a horrible surprise. I once had a guy get fired right there on a support call with me, he lost years worth of data because he wasn't following good archival processes.
For consumer stuff:
- Buy a cheap NAS, plenty out there. Even one with just two drives is better than nothing (that's what I do). Splurge and get one that does RAID-5, you'll thank me one day. By the way, I've used WD stuff for a long time, and it's been the most reliable in my experience even though their customer service is a shit show to deal with. 1a. A cheaper, but less effective option, just buy two drives and see if your BIOS supports RAID (most modern motherboards do). If not, well you can do it in you OS too, but hardware RAID is always better.
- Subscribe to a service like Google Drive, or One Drive, or Dropbox, or whatever you prefer. If you're uncomfortable about putting stuff in the cloud then encrypt it first (VeraCrypt, GPG4Win, Password protected ZIP files even).
If you are running a business, definitely go with a good NAS, AND buy a tape library and get into a routine of rotating out the tapes and storing them off site (tapes are no use to you if your building get broken into, or burns down). And, use cloud storage too.
I email everything to myself like an old lady, and pay Google for extra storage. 🤫
I'm so glad I use crucial SSDs
Are crucial SSDs good? I've been pondering getting a new SSD lately, but with this news I'm starting to lose hope on WD.
Crucial and Samsung have good reputations.
Samsung literally just had an SSD drama with their recent drives burning through write cycles and killing the drive.
Happened to one of my passports. All wiped won't connect
You keep using that word Extreme. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Extreme(ly unreliable)
This reminds me that I need to do my bi-annual backup of all my drives.
…onto WD HDDs no less. 😏
I haven't bought a WD drive over reliability concerns for quite a few years now, but now it makes sense too. I've seen way too many reports of Sandisk drives failing, with the news swept under the rug, and that's very on brand for WD to do
I’ve got an older 500GB one that has been going strong for years. But yeah I just bought a Crucial