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Is it just me or has SanDisk always been kind of sketchy?
I remember hating them when I was using their SD cards on my Nintendo Wii... I had a lot of those little things fail on me.
They were always the cheapest available USB drives, and it always made me go "why? quality?"
I have used SanDisk cards for years, without issue. They are a huge manufacturer of flash memory, which is why their prices were always good. It is certainly possible and even probable that the quality has gone down. All kinds of companies lower their product's quality and reliability to make them cheaper to increase profits.
I've used so many of their memory cards, flash drives, not much in the way of SSDs. I've had only one fail on me, that I can remember. I don't want to say it's not happening. But I also wonder how many fakes ppl received, damaging SD's name. Either way, aside from this latest spat, they've made pretty good products. There was another period years ago I felt they dropped the ball, can't remember why, but otherwise generally good.
Same here. I've only stopped using their stuff when it was already too small for me. Their CruzerBlade flash drives are my favorite flash drives thanks to their fast random access. I installed Linux Mint on 1 of them and it runs fairly well. Much faster than HDD unless you're doing large file transfers. Obviously this greatly limits their lifespan, flash drives can't handle so many writes.
I just replaced a SanDisk MicroSD card in my phone for Samsung one, and I regret it. Moving many small files is noticeably slower.
On the other hand there's Philips. Sequential I/O gave me better results than the SanDisk drive, but that thing isn't even useful as installation disk. That thing is just awfully slow. How they managed to make a flash drive slower than DVD, I don't understand. But hopefully it's just faulty unit that I have.
I had many USB drives and SD cards from them, one actually died after 5 years in my phone and it's not actually fully dead. My Pi runs from them, no problems there.
The complaint is seeking class-action certification on behalf of people who bought a 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, or 4TB SanDisk Extreme Pro, SanDisk Extreme, or Western Digital My Passport SSD that was "designed, manufactured, distributed, promoted and/or sold" since January 2023.
Looks like this is for people who've purchased the drives since January 2023. So does it not affect people from before?
Found a PDF of the complaint from another article, which says "since at least January 2023" on page 15, so, take that as you will.
I wonder if that suggests that hardware made prior to that data doesn't suffer from the same flaws? Or if it's just an arbitrary cut off they decided on for the affected customers they would include in the lawsuit.
This is the important question.
Damn, I have one of these that I use a lot for work, it's been pretty reliable so far, but this makes me think I should get something else to replace it...
Same here -- had one at a previous job and thought it was great. Got another one for my current job, and just bought another one for my Dad. I think the takeaway here is what we've always known though, which is to never trust your storage solutions. As long as there's multiple copies, I think it's okay to continue using them.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Amid ongoing pressure to address claims that its SanDisk Extreme SSDs are still erasing data and becoming unmountable despite a firmware fix, Western Digital is facing a lawsuit over its storage drives.
Complaints about the drives littered SanDisk's forums and Reddit (examples here, here, here, and here) for at least four months before Western Digital released a firmware fix in late May.
Nathan Krum filed a lawsuit [PDF] against Western Digital in a federal court in San Jose, California, on Wednesday, as spotted by The Register.
The complaint says Western Digital "engaged in a scheme to mislead consumers" about Extreme and My Passport SSDs and that both series of drives are still defective after the firmware update, "according to reports from individuals who installed this fix."
Western Digital's current product page advertises Extreme drives as fit for photographers, and it's pushed My Passport as suitable for creators and businesses.
The SMR and drive size scandals resulted in class-action lawsuits, with the former reportedly ending in a $2.7 million settlement and the latter with Western Digital compensating affected parties with free backup and recovery software worth $30.
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We abandoned using SanDisk after WD merged the G-DRIVE into them. This particular model we've seen like half a dozen fail over 6 months as well as 3 failures from their 22TB HDD Pro series which is what replaced G-DRIVE. Their quality has really plummeted.
This is unfortunate. I just bought one a couple months ago but haven’t even opened it yet.
Damn, WD's been my go-to brand for drives for years.
I just bought ones of these on discount at Costco in July… Are they fixed? Can they even be trusted? Ugh.
Someone should get one of these and dd copy all 0xdeadbeefs to the disk
Then dd it all off and confirm no corruption and it truly is the size it says.
Seen firmwares of shitty sd cards and drives lie about their storage capacity
Here is a 15GB card, btw it only has 9GB.
It's worse than that, the computer will still see 15GB, however when you fill it beyond 9GB everything will turn to shit and get corrupted. The idea being that this won't happen until some time after the purchase, making it harder to return.
The issue with this is the difference between GB (1,000,000,000 bytes) and GiB (1,073,741,824 bytes) https://massive.io/file-transfer/gb-vs-gib-whats-the-difference/
HDD manufacturers use GB, which is a metric measurement, because its better for marketing while computers use GiB, which is a binary measurement. So people think they're buying 15GiB but in reality they're buying 13.5GiB marketed as 15GB
Is there any data that backs up the claims of most likely tech-illiterate consumers?
most likely tech-illiterate consumers
You know you really are an elitist for someone who walks around complaining about others using "classist" language.
You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole.
It's a statement of fact. A casual consumer deletes a file, and then thinks that the computer lost their file. You can look at any series of IT complaints and the most common resolution is "user education." So if there is indeed a class-action lawsuit, then during discovery they will need to produce data that shows that these specific drives have some sort of defect or obvious issue that is out of the norm for other drives. I'd like to see that data.
Then look at this thread, everything you're asking for is already linked in this thread. The original complaint, the first time Ars wrote about it a year ago, the reddit threads discussing it, everything.
If you had bothered to read instead of demand it being spoon fed to you, maybe you'd already realize it's not about consumers "losing a file" its about read/write errors and total failure of drives up to and including wholesale loss of all data. It's specifically about SSDs and how these drives aren't living up to expected read/write cycles as advertised. Also, SanDisk/WD already released a patch that was supposed to fix things in many of these drives, and the patch seems to have not changed any error-causing-behavior. (The fact that they released a patch speaks to this being bigger than a consumer "losing a file.")
Oh, and if you're smart enough to be checking the read/write errors you encounter on a drive, you're probably not just a "tech-illiterate consumer." Did you forget a large number of casual hobbyists in the technology space actually do such work for a living?
So your "statement of fact" makes you look illiterate because you couldn't be fucked to read all that in this thread.
There is no data. There are anecdotes about people claiming high read/write errors etc. But I don't see data. A million Hot Saucerman's complaining about their consumer electronics isn't data. Is there a graph aggregating SMART statistics across multiple drives from multiple batches over time? Is there a comparison of those statistics to usage, and generally accepted Industry SSD read/write rates?
Where is it? It certainly wasn't in the articles and it certainly wasn't posted anywhere on Lemmy.
So it went from "consumers don't know any better" to "if consumers haven't aggregated all this data to prove it, it means they're dumb." That's a big fuckin leap, you know, to go from "it's because they lost a file and are too dumb to understand" to numerous people reporting failures of their drives, to where they are unmountable, and it's their fault for not collating all the data first. One might even call it "moving goalposts." I doubt people who are busy worrying about lost data have the time to be organizing a nationwide call to data harvesting for this.
For someone who ostensibly hates capitalism or something, you sure have a funny way of showing it by defending corporate malfeasance by claiming consumer stupidity. Which once again is elitist, and hypocritical coming from you, specifically. Maybe try practicing what you preach.
You are hardcore projecting bro.
Projecting? You only know of me what you've seen in a few threads, and I only know of you what I've seen in a few threads. What I saw was a guy acting like an arrogant prick, even when people were polite and agreed with them. You've continued this arrogance and acting like you know better than anyone else in every thread you've popped up in. You're an elitist, yet you preach not using "classist" speech. I don't know if you're projecting, you're a troll, or if you're just a very sad broken person who can't be fucked to be nice, but I just know you've rubbed me the fucking wrong way after I was super polite to you after a misunderstanding. An unwillingness to give basic human decency and politeness in return makes me think you're a raging asshole, and any time I find you popping up in threads being an asshole I'm gonna dump on your ridiculous fucking takes.
I just asked for data to support a claim made in an article, and apparently that was crossing the Rubicon for you. I really haven no idea what you are on about.