This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I don't care WHY they failed.
My issue is that after they discovered the failure, they continued selling it, nearly a year after the fact.
Not only that, they put it on sale to try and ruddy them out the door before news spread. Really ruins Western Digitals reputation.
Hahaha, WD has been garbage forever. What reputation?
People still buy Seagate even though there has been a track record of massive failures on their HDDs since the early 00's. Didn't matter, people associated it with gaming. WD used to have good quality. There was a bit of a scandal some years ago with their red series when they quietly went to SMR. I have some WD blacks (I think, unsure if they did the color thing at that time) from like '07 that still work reliably. So in the over 20 years I've been building computers, when did 'forever' start?
Over the last 20 years, through numerous computers, I have never had a WD that didn't fail. Usually the ones that came with a computer. I also have helped numerous family and friends with their issues, often failing WD drives in cheap pre-built computers.
I have never had a Seagate fail me, ever. I used to get SanDisk a lot too and their stuff always worked great. Not so much anymore. More recently it seems Samsung is the way to go. Just my experiences.
I stopped buying WD ages ago. I was looking at SD stuff awhile ago not knowing about the sale to WD and decided against it.
Dodged that bullet when I found out
SanDisk had a good name before the acquisition. Their reputation is lasting, unfortunately, longer than their products now.
They had some reputation left to ruin?
This is a bit more detailed, technical explanation:
Industry experts from Attingo, a seasoned data recovery firm that confronts faulty SanDisk Extreme Pro SSDs on a weekly basis, have shed light on the intricate nature of the defects. The company has pinpointed that the resistors deployed in these drives are mismatched with the circuit boards they sit on, leading to precarious connections that under duress, break. The frailty is exacerbated by an unstable soldering material known to bubble and crack, although it is still under debate whether one or both elements are the primary catalyst for the defects.
https://ts2.space/en/analyzing-manufacturing-defects-in-premium-sandisk-ssds/
Mismatched as in incorrect resistance?
As in size. E.g. a 1206 resistor on a 0603 pad or vice versa.
I'm fed up with external hard drives. Every single one I get fails within 2 years. I got a Western Digital "my passport" 2TB hard drive and it only took a year to start making loud clicking noises (failure imminent). Are there any ones out there that are actually built to last, or am I just unlucky?
Get a cheap 2.5" SATA enclosure or an m.2 enclosure and throw a real SSD in it. That's what I've been doing and I get significantly higher speeds for significantly cheaper, as well as not having any fail on me
Yep. A good enclosure with a well rated drive in it is the way to go. Easy peasy to put together and/or pull apart if something goes wrong or you want to upgrade your storage capacity.
Dont use SSDs for offline backups. The flash storage can experience random bit flips if not powered on every now and then.
Do you have more info?
The minimum specs I've seen for NAND flash chips are 10 year retention time at room temperature.
Being powered on isn't enough to change this, the firmware would have to be actively reading, erasing and writing blocks of data to refresh them. I'm sure there are some that will do this, but it would increases some other data loss risks, wear rates and power draw; so I suspect (?) it's not universal.
My professor told me this fact in class, but upon searching for papers I did not find anything to support it.
So probably you are right.
Me having some datasheets that claim one thing doesn't mean it applies to everything and every implementation. Your prof might be right.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A new report from a data recovery company now points the finger at design and manufacturing flaws as the underlying issue with the recent flood of SanDisk Extreme Pro failures that eventually spurred a class action lawsuit.
It became clear in May that some of Western Digital's SanDisk Extreme Pro 4TB SSDs suffered from sudden data loss; at this point, the company promised a firmware update to owners of the 4TB models.
However, newer revisions of these SanDisk Extreme Pro SSDs seem to have been modified with extra epoxy resin to secure the oversized components.
To follow up on its investigation, the Verge quizzed Western Digital about the recurring issue with its Extreme Pro SSDs but did not receive a response as of August 19, 2023.
This is more common with low-quality or counterfeit drives, but this is certainly not the case with the SanDisk Extreme Pro products bought from prominent retailers like Amazon.
While one of the issues is that some of Western Digital's SanDisk Extreme Pro suddenly lose data, another is that the company hasn't communicated well about the problems.
The original article contains 580 words, the summary contains 177 words. Saved 69%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Bad bot. You've removed most of the meat of the article. TL:DR - Oversized components and cheap solder cause weak connections and make the drives prone to breaking. It also impacts 2GB and 3GB drives.
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Behind every driverless car is a team of humans with xbox controllers.
As long as the controller is not wireless and handed over to wealthy titanic tourists.... Okay, that was dark. I apologise.
It's fine, so is the sea at those depths.
The controllers were probably one of the most reliable parts of that sub, but I appreciate your effort.
