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WD refused to answer our questions about its self- wiping SanDisk SSDs
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Why do companies have to behave so shady 😔
There's aren't a lot of manufacturers producing 512GB+ micro sd cards... not sure if Sandisk/WD is worth the risk after this news
I wonder how representative the Extreme portable drives are to their SD cards. SanDisk cards have always been extremely reliable. I assume the Extreme drives are fabricated in a different factory or even outsourced to some random Shenzhen plant. Worrying is the idea that they’ve done the same with SD cards.
All the more reason for them to be transparent, name the problem, remove the affected stock from sale, set up some kind of recovery and/or compensation service, and write off the loss. Otherwise "SanDisk" will mean "you have shit on your shoe" forever. In the storage space a brand has to mean "safe" or its dead.
Maybe they are still finding the edges of the problem. Maybe.
These failures don’t have to do with where they’re manufactured - it seems like this is some sort of firmware bug. NAND doesn’t really just choose to wipe itself at random. Actual NAND chip failures are few and far-between, so this is very likely much more than a hardware issue.
That said, I personally have done a lot of testing with WD-manufactured NAND, compared other companies’ NAND - and the WD NAND is pretty crap. I can’t really go into further details than that, though.
Source - I’m an SSD firmware engineer.
We assume WD isn’t outsourcing their firmware engineering. That could explain why they’re so quiet.
I’d personally be super surprised if they were outsourcing their firmware engineering - but I do suppose it’s technically possible.
I’ve owned SanDisk for years, before 2016 and after. I haven’t seen a quality difference in the products I use but I also haven’t personally owned this Extreme drive. Flash memory used to have abysmal lifespans, like really bad at long-term storage. Makes me wonder if these Extreme drives are using old tech to save WD their bottom dollar.
This is not about microSD cards. This is about some very specific SSD USB hard drives.
Not sure why people would buy these from SanDisk anyway. I generally use Micron for SSDs... they have made various solid state memory products for 20 or 30 years. Not sure where SanDisk came from... I have more heard about flash drives from them and have a bunch of small SD cards myself.
I'm aware of the difference. I was looking from the perspective of WD's recent track record, with things like advertising DM SMR drives as NAS drives when they aren't suited as such - I wouldn't put it past them to make decisions negatively affecting the quality of their subsidaries' other product segments
For SSDs I buy from any brand really - Sandisk, Crucial, Kingston, and occasionally knock off chinese brands. I like Micron's offerings (particularly the MX series with PLP capacitor backup and very generous NAND overprovisioning) but you pay a small premium for those.
Yes I should have said Crucial. That is the brand used by Micron. Just got an MX500, 1TB drive for my Wife.
Who are the big names for SSDs anyway. I mean ones that actually make them and sell them, not just brand them? I just recognize Micron/Crucial from the old days. They do memory chips of other kinds so I felt they should know had to do this sort of memory chip... nothing more... do not know how people in the know rate them.