SanDisk’s silence this week has been deafening. Its moveable SSDs are being lambasted as customers and tech publications name for them to be pulled. The current scrutiny of the drives follows issues from this spring when customers, together with an Ars Technica employees member, noticed Excessive-series moveable SSDs wipe knowledge and change into unmountable. A firmware replace was supposed to sort things, however new complaints dispute its effectiveness. SanDisk has stayed mum on current complaints and hasn’t defined what induced the issues.
In Might, Ars Technica reported on SanDisk Excessive V2 and Excessive Professional V2 SSDs wiping knowledge earlier than typically changing into unreadable to the person’s system. At the very least 4 months of complaints had piled up by then, together with on SanDisk’s boards and throughout Reddit (examples one, two, and three).
Even Ars’ Lee Hutchinson fell sufferer to the defective drives. Two entire Excessive Execs died on him. Each instances they stuffed about 50 % after which confirmed a bunch of learn and write errors. Upon disconnecting and reconnecting, the drive was unformatted and wiped, and he couldn’t repair both drive by wiping and reformatting.
When Ars reached out to SanDisk about the issue in Might, it did not reply most of our questions on why these issues occurred (and, oddly, excluded sure fashions we noticed affected when naming which fashions have been affected). Father or mother firm Western Digital launched a firmware replace on the finish of Might, although, and named these affected drives as supposedly fastened by way of the replace:
- SanDisk Excessive Transportable 4TB (SDSSDE61-4T00)
- SanDisk Excessive Professional Transportable 4TB (SDSSDE81-4T00)
- SanDisk Excessive Professional Transportable 2TB (SDSSDE81-2T00)
- SanDisk Excessive Professional Transportable 1TB (SDSSDE81-1T00)
- Western Digital My Passport 4TB (WDBAGF0040BGY)
“We addressed this firmware difficulty within the manufacturing course of, and we will affirm that the difficulty just isn’t impacting at present transport merchandise,” Western Digital’s firmware replace web page says.
Regardless of that affirmation, The Verge’s supervising producer is having a really unhealthy week, and the location’s blaming it on SanDisk.
SanDisk SSD troubles proceed
On Monday, The Verge reported that the substitute moveable SSD SanDisk despatched supervising producer Vjeran Pavic after his 4TB Excessive Professional Transportable inadvertently wiped 4TB of video. The drive was supposed to incorporate the firmware repair, however The Verge reportedly nonetheless “misplaced 3TB of video we’d shot for The Verge as a result of the drive is not readable.” It shared a screenshot saying, “The disk you hooked up was not readable by this laptop.”
Moreover, individuals on social media declare their Excessive moveable SSDs aren’t working both.
For instance, Pure-Reverse-633 on Reddit posted on July 26 that they up to date their 4TB Excessive SSD’s firmware, however then….
… a few week after that, I used to be transferring some information from my Android system to it, and it did the identical factor, unmounted and would not mount until you formatted it. The info may very well be recovered with Diskdrill, however with generic serialized names. … I’ve 4 of those drives in whole, one 4TB and one 2TB that aren’t flagged as being affected and have been fairly stable. One new 4TB that was flagged as being affected and [had] knowledge loss twice as described above, and one new 4TB I received by way of an Amazon sale that I am regretting shopping for.
Further cases are much less clear about whether or not or not they deployed SanDisk’s firmware replace earlier than experiencing issues. Nonetheless, individuals proceed to battle with and mistrust these moveable SSDs.
A person often known as Shopping_Particular posted on Reddit three days in the past that their 4TB Excessive SSD grew to become unreadable to its Mac.
“After taking pictures for a pair days I went to again up the information and my laptop cannot learn it/it will not mount,” they wrote.
One other Reddit person, Psychological_Bee687, posted final month that their 1TB SanDisk drive dismounted from their MacBook Professional earlier than refusing to mount.
“I attempted to get it to mount—and even present up in Disk Utility—on my previous [MacBook Pro] 2015 however no luck. After making an attempt the whole lot I do know, and some issues I didn’t, I can’t get it to even mount or be seen by Disk Utility,” they wrote.
There’s at the very least one instance of the firmware replace working. Is that why SanDisk is not addressing clients’ remaining issues, even after a preferred publication like The Verge calls them out based mostly on first-hand expertise?
The Verge is not the one tech publication “livid” with SanDisk. On Tuesday, PetaPixel aired its grievances, beginning with a damning headline: “SanDisk Transportable SSDs Are Failing So Steadily, We Can No Longer Advocate Them.”
