Western Digital sued over claims of data-trashing SanDisk, My Passport SSDs

Western Digital was sued on Tuesday on behalf of a California resident who claims the solid state drive he bought from the manufacturer was defective and that the storage slinger shipped kit that didn't live up to its marketing promises. The complaint [PDF], filed in federal court in San Jose, California, where the storage …

[Anonymous Coward]

Toshiba, Too

Back when Toshiba made hard drives, I purchased one of their external hard drives. When connected via external SATA, the drive would electronically disconnect from the host (my Dell laptop) after a few seconds, both under Linux and MS Windows. It worked fine via USB. Toshiba had a firmware update, which I applied, with no change in behavior.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Toshiba, Too

E-SATA required more power which is why the recommended cabling length went up to 2 meters (from 1) and most headers on a mobo didn't supply this. Add-on cards were hit or miss as some of the ones that took external power via 4-pin molex/sata still didn't inject the power. If all that was correct, then the bios also had to support the hot plug option for the drives else 1 tiny drop in voltage would disconnect the drive. I used E-SATA exclusively on 2 machines for about 3 years for the boot option. E-SATA was problematic but it did offer an external option to boot from in a time when either a lot USB controllers didn't or a lot of distros didn't for small/tiny form factor users.

[cornetman]

Just had a very quick failure of a WD Blue SSD. Honestly I have had better life out of Aliexpress SSDs. Paid a bit more for a Crucial MX500 replacement.

[StrangerHereMyself]

Just buy Samsung. I only have Samsung SSD's in my home and never had any problems for years and years.

My Sandisk MicroSD cards are holding up well, though. So it's not all crap they're selling.

[FIA]

I hate to say this, but agreed.

The only issue I've had with Samsung is when an 850Pro failed (started to show bad sectors) and they refused to honour the 10 year warranty as it was (apparently) a grey import. (I'd bought it off amazon).

So I had this weird case of a company admitting it was their product, and was genuine, and was covered by a 10 year guarantee, but as I wasn't in the right bit of the planet they refused to honour it.

They do unfortunately still make the best SSDs though.

[Marcelo Rodrigues]

"The only issue I've had with Samsung is when an 850Pro failed (started to show bad sectors) and they refused to honour the 10 year warranty as it was (apparently) a grey import. (I'd bought it off amazon)."

I stopped buying Samsung when they did almost the same to me. The difference was: it wasn't a grey import. They just didn't feel like honoring the warranty.

Fuck them.

[The Man Who Fell To Earth]

Too small

I have had excellent experience over many PC's and many years with Samsung SSD's. The issue with them now however, is they only make M.2 SSD's up to 2TB. If you want a 4TB Samsung SSD, you're stuck with a 2.5" SATA drive. The last few laptops I've upgraded to 4TB M.2 NVMe SSD's, I had to use Corsair MP600 PRO's & WD_BLACK 4TB SN850X's.

[cornetman]

Yeah, my work laptop has a Samsung and I have been hammering it for years with VMs and stuff. Can't fault it at all. They just go on and on.

I got the Crucial because it gets consistently good reviews and is reasonably priced.

[anothercynic]

I can only second this... Samsung own the hardware and make the controller for it, and the firmware for the controller. Everything is 100% in-house. I have several external Samsung SSDs (from the 500GB T1s through to 2TB T7s) and they all still do what they're meant to, and the Samsung 2.5" HDD-replacement SSDs are also rock-solid.

I'm bummed for the user in question who is now forced to sue WD, because that stings. You'd think Sandisk would be a brand to be able to trust, but clearly that's not the case.

[Anonymous Coward]

WD quality has been on the decline for almost a decade. Their drives stink.

"Without warning these hard drives have wiped out data stored on them, making the files stored on them unable to be accessed" Well, duh. That's the nature of SSD's and NVMe. They can die on you in a microsecond. Regular HDD at least give you some bad block warnings (for the most part), but SSD's can go from good to bad in the snap of a finger. Any drive type from any manufacturer can die. Its been that way since the first floppy disk hit the market.

Backups, backups, backups. If you don't use backups, you deserve to lose your files. You can't sue your way to not being moronic FFS.

https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive-test-data

HGST used to be the best quality drives until WD bought them, of course.

[the Jim bloke]

Products labelled as 'Extreme'

I know its just marketing BS, but if you pay for a consumer product labelled Extreme - the connotations are on-the-edge, high risk.... not reliability. In other words, they are intended for gullible idiots.

[FIA]

Re: Products labelled as 'Extreme'

Extreme just means 'at the extremity'. That could be of performance, or reliability.

In other words, they are intended for gullible idiots.

This seems an odd assertion? Effective marketing doesn't automatically mean a poor product.

Mind you, I live in the UK where my consumer rights say that things have to be 'fit for purpose' so I could just be spoilt expecting things that I buy to work as advertised.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Products labelled as 'Extreme'

That could be of performance, or reliability.

Or unreliability in this case.

[trindflo]

Re: Products labelled as 'Extreme'

You didn't need to call people idiots, but I agree a barrage of marketing hype with all the favorite buzzwords is not a good recommendation.

Of course, I recall being given an assignment in a comsci class to pick up any magazine that had computer advertising in it and summarize what they were promoting. It was always features and never reliability and the entire class had the same results. The marketers are not idiots: they advertise what people will buy. If nobody is buying reliability, that isn't the marketer's fault per-se (fit for purpose arguments aside, and no I don't believe there is any such protection in the US outside of drug safety; bureaus exist, but have been systematically defunded and/or defanged.)

[Anonymous Coward]

Cue the litany of complaints

From individuals about assorted drive (and other components) that have failed them. Bonus points if a single failure story is followed by "will never buy from <major supplier> again".

Because even with a 99.9% (or better!) "good" rate there will always be failures and these will always stick in our craw and be regurgitated endlessly.

Now, if you have a tale where half the crate of "model nnn-nn" were bad, and especially if the seller and manufacturer all refused to replace or reimburse, that is worth hearing. Or you've evidence of similar issues spread over a significant number of individual cases, ditto.

Me?

I've had drives and other bits DOA; sent 'em back, got replacements, they worked, life trundles on.

[doublelayer]

Re: Cue the litany of complaints

I definitely commiserate about those reviews. They make judging the quality of any storage device nearly impossible, because you'll be inundated with confirmation bias of people who only ever bought $manufacturer drives (all three of them) and they all worked great, or they bought two other drives from $other_manufacturer and they both failed (possibly in reasonable failure cases because there are no details provided). At some point, you might end up just buying whatever device is the cheapest made by a manufacturer you're confident is a real one and not someone selling refurbished drives as new.

However, I have seen this particular problem noted in a number of places recently. I can't throw any anecdotes in myself as I don't have this or any other portable SSD, but if anecdote frequency means anything, there may be something more to this malfunction.

[Flocke Kroes]

Re: Cue the litany of complaints

Blackblaze now operate enough SSDs to generate some statistically significant results on a few models. Only 3 WD Blues, which started operation in early December last year so no significant results for them in last year's annual report. They buy mostly M2s and presumably are able to source genuine hardware, not the crap that gets foisted onto retail customers.

I check with them before buying spinning disks. Perhaps in a few years it will be worth making the same effort with flash.

[Elongated Muskrat]

Re: Cue the litany of complaints

I had some memory from Corsair a few years back (it was a 16GB set of four 4GB sticks of, IIRC DDR3, so a little while ago). After a few years of continued use of the RAM, overclocked within spec (it was advertised as overclockable), my PC started developing intermittent faults. Booting to a memtest CD showed one to be faulty. Corsair, when I contacted them, were happy to honour the lifetime original-owner guarantee, and replaced the RAM, although they wanted me to send the whole set back for replacement, not just the faulty module, which led to me buying some faster 8Gb sticks (also Corsair), using them in place, and selling the replacement when it came, effectively giving me a cut-price upgrade.

Their kit seems rock solid, and their customer service is second-to-none.

Sorry, that's not a complaint, but I just felt they deserved my endorsement.

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't armwaving

This set of related failures stems from flaws in the sandisk hardware that cause the onboard controller to fail when performing routine drive operations. I have seen a couple of these myself, and I have some of the tools to dump what's happening on the USB interface. These aren't just filesystem problems where the computer it's plugged into doesn't see a valid file system. The whole controller is dropping out.

I have seen a higher incidence of this when the drive is being provisioned or re-provisioned, and if that operation fails or the drive disconnects mid operation then the drive hardware essentially dies and can't be recovered. This happens both with the Sandisk Memory cards and the external drives, and something similar with a WD red. I had two drives fail me in one day while trying to take a snapshort of a departing employees machine, a 2TB WD Red and a 1TB microsd card. We have lost a couple of the Sandisk Extreme Externals we were using with Time Machine as well.

Either this will come out in court or hardware hackers will identify the failure mode explicitly.

What is clear is that WD is stonewalling for a problem that is larger than they have been admitting. Initially they swore it was only a limited number of 4 and 2 Tb drives, now we are seeing failures across the 1T and other drives, and no mention of the SD card issues has yet been made. That means that I can't trust them for data storage and have to move the contents onto alternative storage.

That also means plenty of them will be up for grabs for the hardware hackers. Best of luck to the laywers in the class action.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Cue the litany of complaints

"Now, if you have a tale where half the crate of "model nnn-nn" were bad,"

One of the OEMs I do warranty work for seemed to have an abnormally high SSD failure rate, pretty much all of the described symptoms as per the article, ie not deteced, random disconnects and going read-only. They started sending out a different brand of warranty replacements and eventually the new laptops were coming with these other brand SSDs. The failure rate dropped through the floor. It's quite rare to replace an SSD under warrant for that OEM these days. And yes, the original brand with the huge failure rate was WD.

Now, I can't give figures since the multiple clients I was working at had a LOT of this OEMs laptops so maybe it was only 1% or even less. I can't say because I don't know their total fleet size. But the difference in the failure rates was incredibly obvious when the SSD brand change happened.

[SanDisk failed on me]

I lost 3 years worth of music and photography

I lost 3 years of my art/music because I was moving it from one drive to another using a sandisk extreme 2T. You know the ones that are dying EVERYWHERE…. My data recovery company sees 4 a day and has to pull all the chips off the pcb and re-solder them all due quality control issues on manufacture. All the solder appears to be heating up and burning away due to high heat. This leads to the drive completely failing. Fortunately for me they retrieved all of my data at the tune of 580$…

[Korev]

Re: I lost 3 years worth of music and photography

Bot account?

[Korev]

Re: I lost 3 years worth of music and photography

Assuming you're not a bot account and run a data recovery business as you say; why do you only have one copy of your data?

[Steve Graham]

Re: I lost 3 years worth of music and photography

"my data recovery company" means the company he selected to recover his data. That's where the "580$" comes in. (Oddly putting the currency sign after the digits. Not something a dollar user would do?)

[Cav]

Re: I lost 3 years worth of music and photography

Putting the dollar symbol after the digits is odd but common here in the US.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: I lost 3 years worth of music and photography

Is that a sign of the quality of education so people write things as they hear them? Or just a ChatGPT error? :-)

(Note the name of the OP, hence the questions about it being a bot account)

[Cav]

Re: I lost 3 years worth of music and photography

I blame the educational standard, that and laziness!

The name just indicates someone with an ax to grind on this issue.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: I lost 3 years worth of music and photography

"I blame the educational standard, that and laziness!"

Yeah, I would ov 2. Ay viola, proof it's not a rouge bot :-)

[BobTheIntern]

Re: I lost 3 years worth of music and photography

The United States Department of Education: We put the K-W back into educational KWALITY every day!

[GrumpenKraut]

Re: I lost 3 years worth of music and photography

Certainly a bot. Reported.

[ChrisC]

Re: I lost 3 years worth of music and photography

"I was moving it from one drive"

There's your first mistake. If you'd simply *copied* it onto the new drive and then kept the old old as a backup, then you wouldn't have needed to engage the services of a data recovery company...

[Anonymous Coward]

@ChrisC - Re: I lost 3 years worth of music and photography

All right, this proves he is human. A bot wouldn't do that :)

[Cav]

Re: I lost 3 years worth of music and photography

How could anyone down vote that?! You are absolutely correct. Copy not move. Why would anyone even think to remove before verifying the data from the original drive?

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: I lost 3 years worth of music and photography

Upvoted for the logic, but most likely "he" meant copying but said "moving" intended as a synonym, which in IT terms fails because those two words mean something so very different to what it might mean in the context of lazy everyday speech.

[Mike_R]

Re: I lost 3 years worth of music and photography

So simply restore your latest full backup. Oh...

[Stork]

Re: I lost 3 years worth of music and photography

Or alternatively from your offline archive of particularly important stuff.

[BobTheIntern]

Re: I lost 3 years worth of music and photography

I, too ask snarky, assumption-laden questions about people's backups, secondary backup in a separate format/system, and tertiary backups stored offsite (all as the 3-2-1 Rule of Backups suggest) with a near absolute certainty that they do not possess a single backup, let alone three of them with the various redundancies of storage medium/separate systems, and onsite/offsite backup availability.

I do not do this to be cruel or out of any sense of schadenfreude; quite the opposite, in fact. I empathize with their pain because I, too was burned by a hard drive failure many, many moons ago in my PFY days and lost a few years of stuff because I hadn't bothered to consider having at least a basic backup plan as a failsafe. What I did obtain in place of all of my lost files was a profound sense of the urgency and importance of backing up anything and everything which has any value at all to me. As they say, "If you don't have a backup of it, it doesn't exist".

We ask these questions already knowing the answer to teach that unfortunate soul who just lost 20 years of family photos what questions they need to ask and answer to and for themselves. I usually suggest they begin by ensuring anything of any importance "lives" in a cloud storage folder such as Google Drive/One Drive/iCloud on their local machine as a simple Poor Man's Backup solution which is (marginally) better than having no backups at all.

[smudge]

There's an opportunity there

the case aspires to be certified as a class action that would represent an unspecified number of customers said to have experienced similar device failures or data loss. The class potentially consists of "tens if not hundreds of thousands of individuals" in the United States.

There's an opportunity there for someone to initiate hundreds of thousands of induhviduals into the secret, shadowy world of "making backups".

[doublelayer]

Re: There's an opportunity there

Admittedly, these portable SSDs are a way, if an expensive one, for people to make backups. When I've gotten people to start backing up, it would be more convenient to get them using a RAID array and automatic backup software like I've got, but it's also a lot of work, expense, and network configuration. Buying an external hard drive and remembering to copy stuff to it periodically and leave it in a safe place is easier and still counts as a backup. If their complaints are correct, then someone doing a simple backup might find that their backup has failed at the time they're trying to use it to restore. It's a bit badly targeted to complain about users not backing up when the problem is failure of backup drives.

[James O'Shea]

Re: There's an opportunity there

At home, I have a nice simple system: several external 10TB drives (soon to be replaced by something bigger) connected by USB3. Carbon Copy Cloner on Macs and Macrium Reflect on Windows and Clonezilla on Linux back up the entire contents of selected volumes trivially. I then disconnect the drives until next time. (Apple also has TimeMachine, but for best results, that shouldn't be disconnected.)

I have to invest in an array and software to feed it over the network... except that by unplugging the drives after the backup (to a disk image. usually), I cut back on the chances that someone naughty will play with my backups. Accidentally or deliberately. Using the 10 TB drives means I can stick multiple images on one drive. Single point of failure, but mitigated by TimeMachine on Macs and dropping images across the network on Windows and Linux. And dumping important files onto USB sticks. Multiple USB sticks, just in case. When I go to the array, I'd have to dismount and remount the array, and that might be... interesting.

At the office, we have tape. And arrays. And massive paranoia.

[Mishak]

Firmware updates

Do they make it easy to update the firmware, regardless of OS?

Samsung is Windows only (I think).

Crucial is also Windows only, though they do support the creation of a boot image that you can then use for MacOS (Intel only?) - but that only works for internal drives, and not for ones connected via USB.

FreeBSD - probably out of luck.

[Snake]

Re: Firmware updates

I have a question that is not answered: is the failure in the SSD drive or in the supporting [USB] external interface hardware, and is the firmware update for, the SSD drive proper or the interface?

Important difference. If the external (case) USB interface is failing then shuck the drive and plug it in directly; if the SSD drive is the culprit then not much can be done.

[J. Cook]

Re: Firmware updates

I had a WD passport fail on me a few years ago. the controller would randomly disconnect after a few hours of being powered up. The kicker is that the controller for those devices does something with the drive, so that the bare drive shows up as a blank device with an unknown partition on it, so that I couldn't just shuck the drive and park it into a fresh enclosure.

Thankfully, I was able to keep it running long enough to get the non-duplicated data from it, at which point I shucked the drive, loaded it into a new third party enclosure, and re-built the partition. The drive itself was fine- it was one of the Green labeled drives.

for the failure listed in the article? it didn't really say.

I suspect the firmware update was for the enclosure's USB to SATA bridge, but it could be both controller and drive.

The three Seagate external drives I have work 'well enough' for keeping copies of the media I've ripped and compressed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Firmware updates

It's tricky, as the drives we have seen die look to have lost the controller. If the drive keels over BEFORE you update the firmware, it is undetectable to the host machine and their updater can't "See" it.you

Also, the updates have been coming out in dribs and drabs, and they are blocking people from downloading the updater unless it matches certain drive serial numbers. All of which looks like a coverup to keep people from reversing the update and figuring out what the "patch" is doing(and why it's not working on drives that have already died).

As these are external mini SSDs, it's not as simple as swapping out a USB sub-board on a full size drive. Ditto for the impacted MicroSD cards.

One of the other posters referenced heat issues, and a possible repair/recovery by reflowing the board, which would point toward an expensive and humiliating hardware recall if it's true.

Either way, the competition has a great shot at stealing market share for the pocket drive market.

[Ace2]

Re: Firmware updates

They appear to have updaters for Mac, Windows, and (maybe) Linux. You need an affected SN to download.

Their site claims that my two SanDisk portable SSDs are not affected, even though both have repeatedly disconnected unexpectedly during use for the whole time I’ve had them.

Switching to Samsung as I write this…

[anothercynic]

Re: Firmware updates

Unfortunately, Samsung is Windows-only, and for M.2 drives, they don't support USB 3 as an interface (so plugging one into one of those external enclosures doesn't really seem to work). And don't bother trying to run Windows in a virtual environment with the hope that you can update the firmware in your NVMe stick, that won't work either.

[trindflo]

Samsung is Windows-only?

"Unfortunately, Samsung is Windows-only"

That claim seemed strange to me: wouldn't it take considerable effort to make memory not work under a specific operating system.

I checked Samsung's website and they say this:

"Samsung NVMe™ SSDs are compatible with Linux. Please note, however, that Samsung NVMe™ SSDs are optimized for use under Windows operating systems."

Perhaps what you meant was the firmware patches will only apply under Windows?

Or that the memory won't work as well in non-Windows systems?

[Ace2]

Re: Samsung is Windows-only?

They must have meant the firmware updater. The T7 SSD I bought as the replacement clearly advertises Windows, Mac, and Linux. (And I understand how strange it would be for a standards-compliant mass storage device to have an OS dependency in the first place…)

[VicMortimer]

Western Dataloss

Is anybody really surprised?

There's no way I'd ever trust data to a Western Dataloss drive. And that applies to SSDs just as much as it applies to spinny platters.

[Anonymous Coward]

@VicMortimer - Re: Western Dataloss

This is your personal experience.

Mine is different, I never had any WD drive failure. At least so far.

[cornetman]

Re: @VicMortimer - Western Dataloss

All of the WD spinning disk units I've had have been superb. I immediately went to WD for their flash SSDs because of their reputation only to have the quick failure that I mentioned above.

Probably should have just stuck with Crucial and Samsung.

[Sudosu]

Re: Western Dataloss

I have somewhere around a dozen WD reds (4TB, 8TB) that have been in my multiple NAS servers for up to a good chunk of a decade without a peep, same with old HGST drives I got before WD bought them.

Many have outlasted the servers they were running in.

On the other hand I have a stack of a dozen dead 3TB Segate's that were class actioned in another country (worst, drives, ever) a couple 1.5TB several 1TB and a stack of 500GB that are waiting for me to pull them apart and salvage the magnets. They mostly died within a year or two.

Essentially every Seagate I have ever bought is dead and none of the WD's. Hell, I even still have some WD Caviars 6GB that still work.

Of course everyone's mileage will vary depending on generation and batch of drives.

Always keep at least two backups and store one at a relatives house in case of natural disaster.

[doublelayer]

Re: Western Dataloss

Since you mentioned it, when you've opened them up and retrieved the magnets, what do you do with them? I have a few of them sitting around, and while they're a bit handy if I ever need a magnet that's relatively strong and I don't mind having a really ungainly shape, that kind of situation doesn't happen very often.

[Sudosu]

Re: Western Dataloss

I don't really pull them for a specific purpose, I just hate to toss them out.

I use some for wood glue jobs of thin materials.

I put a bunch in a plastic jar with a handle and a string to pick up nails in the yard

You can use them to magnetize screwdrivers.

I use a couple glued on my garage man door to stick it to a metal shelf to keep it open

You could glue some to the bottom of an old plastic bowl to keep nuts and bolts from automotive projects in one spot

Others just go on the fridge.

I am sure there are much better ideas than mine out there though.

[Cav]

Re: Western Dataloss

I've used Western for literally decades. Never had a problem.

[897241021271418289475167044396734464892349863592355648549963125148587659264921474689457046465304467]

New WB Black HDs only lasted about a year, instead of the usual approx 8. I may try swapping boards over from some of a similar age, to recover data, but I doubt this is likely to work.

[J. Cook]

Speaking with ~20 years in the business from a field repair tech, and later as the storage admin for a small / medium company with ~750 TB of data storage appliances: All storage media brands suck.

All {drives | USB sticks | memory cards | SSDs | NVMe | M.2 SSDs} will fail, and all companies have periods where they have a production run (or three) that just have problems. A LOT of WD drives failed after they re-built one of their manufacturing facilities. (WD currently owns SanDisk Fujitsu, and probably someone else; Seagate and Samsung still own themselves, Micron has Crucial and Toshiba, IIRC.)

The only answer to the data integrity issue is multiple copies, on multiple media types, from different brands. "One is none" and all that.

There's a reason why most businesses use servers with RAID arrays, disk mirrors, and multiple storage media types, and data integrity / resiliency is one of them.

I'll shut up now, because I'm preaching to the choir. :)

[Anonymous Coward]

You were missing HGST

I also think what you said about bad batches and maintaining brand and model diversity to protect against those type of failures bears repeating. If you favor the same model drive, even in large redundant arrays, you may have a bad day if the model has a problem and starts to choke.

As to the brand reputation, a bad batch is a huge problem, but a bad response from the maker is worse. We were using the IBM Deskstars (aka Deathstars) in shipping security appliances and spent quite a while mopping up the mess those created. IBM wen't into denial, then hiding, then finally bowed to pressure from it's OEMS and started a recall. Which we then had to sort out how to handle in the field, and deal with customer who lost log data due to multiple failures across multiple drive arrays.

So now I mix brands and batches at different levels of the storage tiers, so that a bad drive model can't wipe out a whole silo of redundancy.

I also feel for home users, who have neither the training or know how to handle something like this without losing data. WE should know better, but they don't, and they shouldn't have to.

Their laptop, which probably doesn't have resilient storage, didn't come with real backup software, and wasn't bundled with enough external storage to backup the machine.

So we (as the tech industry) set them up to fall over with a failure like this, and too many schools literally teach their students to just carry around a flash drive with all their academic work on it.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: You were missing HGST

"As to the brand reputation, a bad batch is a huge problem, but a bad response from the maker is worse. We were using the IBM Deskstars (aka Deathstars) in shipping security appliances and spent quite a while mopping up the mess those created. IBM wen't into denial, then hiding, then finally bowed to pressure from it's OEMS and started a recall. Which we then had to sort out how to handle in the field, and deal with customer who lost log data due to multiple failures across multiple drive arrays."

Likewise, MicroStar, now MSI when the "fake capacitor" scandal hit and they denied they were affected despite their motherboards having a huge failure rate. We lost customers over it because we simply could not replace the boards fast enough and, at the time, were not big enough to be able to buy in 100's of advance stock boards for pro-active replacements as MicroStar refused to accept boards back under warranty before they failed so we would have ended up paying for their poor support.

[Snapper]

Old news

When you look at WD's history, with macOS 10.9 Mavericks wiping WD drives because WD had not modified their drivers for year despite strong warnings from Apple, then two or possibly three attempts to flog unsuitable 'NAS' drives that could lose massive amounts of data in the last 5-6 years, I think my trust in them is almost totally gone.

[Grinning Bandicoot]

Is it MBA syndrone

What irritates me all to hell is that with the amount of WD drives is that the supposed fix much less the problem was heard here and not from WD. I've registered mostly all devices for warranty purposes but also to get fault information. When traveling at the end of the day the laptop and other digital information is copied into one of these drives and the last thing wanted is after something stupid happened to the primary source is to learn that the time spent making the copies was just pissing into the wind. It appears the the MBAs have again taken over from QA and another once respected name has been flushed.

[Sparkus]

I still mirror my flash drives within a NAS.....

.....and back them up to spinning metal every two weeks or so. The flash array stays at home office while the spinning metal gets exchanged to a closet shelf at the bro in laws house.

Primary backup software are the community editions of Veeam running a set of three backup media plus the primary/on-line storage. Checksums all around.

I 'trust' the longevity of spinning metal. You can pretty much put it on the shelf and walk away from it. The long-term shelf-stability of flash drives is yet to be proven to my satisfaction.

NB; on the conventional drives, I go out of my way to get non-SMR stuff. That's serious black magic there........