I had one of these Sandisk SSD’s and the usb c jack got a little wonky over time. I contacted support and they completely replaced it and paid for shipping. Super fast and made me a fan of their support. Sucks to read so many people have had issues lately, I thought they were one of the few companies left that actually honored their work and their warranties. Maybe I just got lucky?
Reputation in data storage is hard to make and easy to destroy. SanDisk not only made a defective product, but has since shown that they are not standing behind their products. I have bought SanDisk in the past, but their reputation is now destroyed for me.
I work in data storage, but not for a hardware manufacturer nor for any of the involved parties.
Man i just bought the one in the photo from Costco last week bc it was on sale.
It should be noted that SanDisk is owned by Western Digital and any contempt should be applied to them as well.
yup
they used to be top tier in flash storage in the early days
have a sandisk right now that i still use daily
would be looking for other options next time
and WD owns them
I’ve had an absolute nightmare just earlier this year with their ‘high performance’ SD cards. All kinds of errors, including but not limited to being completely unable to format them at all, even with advanced techniques.
After multiple weeks of back and forth and ending up refunding all of them and forgetting it completely…yeah. I wasn’t about to recommend them.
But now I’d actively encourage anyone to stay away. A company with products of such poor quality that you can’t even tell the real from the fake.
These are trash
Anyone have details about which drives or which years of production etc? Article seems to imply in general without specifics.
Also I believe in variety being a good thing when it comes to storage and not relying too much on a single disk, on a basic consumer level anyways where it’s easy to do unless you have a really high amount of data.
I own a 2 TB model purchased in January of 2020 that I primarily use for Time Machine backups. I have not experienced any issues (thus far).
There seems to be mixed opinions & information available as to whether the issue(s) affect all models, specific years, specific sizes, etc.
Must be all of them. I got a san disk SSD years ago (when sky lake was first release so 10 years ago?) and it completely died in less than 12 months, I was actually speechless. I had to fight the company I bought it from to get it returned but eventually they accepted it, and sent it bask to san disk for analysis… moral of the story: never buy a san disk SSD. They have OK SD cards, but that’s about it.
Ironically I still have a working OCZ drive with a Sand Force controller that’s long outlived that san disk POS and the sand force controller was well known for failure and being awful
Dang would you look at that. Never really like SanDisk and switched away from them years ago. Had an SD card fail on me, switched to Samsung cards, haven’t had a problem since.
Damn, I was just about to buy a few of these for christmas.
Definitely skipping now.
I just ordered two of these for work. I looked up the competition for what to get and these have glowing reviews, as do other options that all seem identical. And everything is ultimately from one or two parent companies.
What’s the alternative??
There is no SanDisk, that’s just a brand name.
There is only Western Digital which acquired and absorbed SanDisk years ago. WD designs the devices, WD writes the firmware, WD manufactures the flash memory, assembles and tests (?) the products, and takes all the revenue.
SanDisk is just a sticker WD puts on consumer products because SanDisk built a reputation for reliable products (before they were acquired by WD).
BTW, WD is first and foremost a hard drive company. They’re pretty good at HDDs but have always looked down on flash. You can tell. I don’t buy any WD/SanDisk products.
Signed, a former SanDisk and reluctant WD employee.
I bought a WD drive last year that was immediately defective. I installed Debian on it and immediately got syslog messages about bad blocks. Like seriously, is there any QC?
BTW, WD is first and foremost a hard drive company. They’re pretty good at HDDs but have always looked down on flash.
the rest i already knew but this is good info
Isn’t the WD sn850x considered a top SSD right now?
lol @ “pretty good at hard drives”! The NAS/homeserver community has been burned quite a few times lately by WD. They are dead to me.
oof
if true, then another classic case of large company buying smaller company and becoming shit
WD is sabotaging their own reputation, the Red drive SMR bait and switch already says all.
Same how the Blue series CMR drive WD20EZRZ got superseded by the WD20EZAZ, just larger cache and it’s SMR now. In shops like Mindfactory there was not even a real price difference between the two. I found that shady at the time.
Funny, my sandisks micro SD cards all died within 6 months, I said never again to SanDisk, they’re like the acer of the storage world
It took me seven months and hours of work to get those clowns to honor their warranty for a failed drive. There were dead links everywhere, broken email addresses, support lines where the calls dropped routinely. Not only did their product suck but they have the most dysfunctional warranty process I’ve ever seen. I eventually had to file a complaint with my state attorney general to get them to honor the warranty. I’m never buying SanDisk again.
Reminds me of the rigamarole I went through to file a warranty claim with Ticwatch. The warranty website randomly alternated from not loading to only loading the Italian version no matter what computer, network, or VPN I used. Intentional AF and super frustrating. I bought a Samsung after all of that, at least they honor warranties.
Seagate has been no better within the last year. Maybe it’s just with their NAS hard drives. Bottom line is that these drives are failing and it takes 2-3 months if your lucky to get a recertified HD back. Wait, it gets better! Only to find out that the recertified drives fail straight out of the box.
I had 2 Seagate NAS drives fail within a month of getting them brand new. I got these in the beginning of July. I RMA’d both drives and it took at least 8 weeks to get RMA & ship them. Another 8 weeks to get them back. Only to have both fail right out of the box.
Only last week was I able to send them out for RMA. At this rate I will be lucky if I get the drives back in January. Will they work? Who the hell knows.
I had a new 1tb 7200rpm drive from 2016?ish that started having errors after 2 months of use. It still passes SMART and hasnt had any data loss, but it is firmly in the “do not store anything important on” category.
HGST drives are the only drive I will ever use for storage.
Backblaze reports have validated my stance.
That’s… weird. I have to return a couple of Seagate drives a year (I have multiple NAS and have close to 50 Seagate drives running at any time).
The warranty return process takes 5 minutes online, and they send me a new drive that I get in 2-3 days, before I even send the defective one back. And this isn’t a one time thing, this is how it’s worked for me when dealing with Seagate for close to a decade.
I’m not sure how our experiences have been so different.
There are only 2 kinds of storage… Those that have failed and those that will.
All drives fail eventually - but Seagate soured me on their brand years ago.
Decades ago, young me used to drive down to Fry’s and look at the posted paper flyer for deals.
A 100GB Seagate drive for a great price? I excitedly bought it, even though my work pile of dead drives mostly consisted of Seagate drives. Something something volume not representing something something complete.
2 months later, Seagate drive fails. The RMA process was quick and easy. 1 week later, that drive fails. RMA it. A month later, that drive fails.
Seagate says its the last drive they’ll replace as I must be killing them with my bad Seasonic power supply.
I replace it with a WD drive at the same price point. No issues.
Almost 20 years later, I still have my 480p *.mkv collection from tvtorrents.
Sure would be nice if our totally-not-corrupt government would crack down on companies offering warranties that they never honor. Maybe if we complain about it constantly for the next 20 years, they’ll give us a nice speech about it and pass a symbolic bill voicing their displeasure.
PayPal and Subway have nonexistent customer service. PayPal’s phone will drop the call when selecting to making a claim. Subway seems to move everything to an automated system, so I got my bank to charge back after giving me someone else’s less expensive order.
It is the AI revolution at work.
I’m glad I didn’t see this post until two months after buying a SanDisk…
Sigh. Sandisk used to have best CF card years ago.
Meanwhile SanDisk SD cards always had an absolutely terrible reputation for high failure rates and terrible performance on anything involving random writes. I remember back in the PalmOS days that Palm officially recommended not using cards from SanDisk.
Ive used sandisk cards foe the past few years, no failures. Can’t say this feels like its the case. Every photographer I work with uses the same sandisk sd card (64/128/256gbs v30).
I don’t know where you got this reputation from. Been using them for 20 years and have never heard of high failure rates.
My Sandisk drive failed prematurely recently and I’d love to know where you started so I can save myself as much of a headache as possible.
If TitsMcGrits is never buying them again, then I am out too.
But for real, you are 100% right. Their rep is trash. I’ll never purchase them again.
100% by design
I was about to by an external hard drive that looked just like that…. Which one do y’all recommend then?
There are no “good” drive manufacturers. All of them eventually put out a bad model or series and you won’t have any warning until they start going bad en masse.
Make backups.
Anything Samsung
I’ve got a 1TB Sandisk SSD, had a software issue where the file system got corrupted. I’ve documented the fix here: https://old.reddit.com/r/datarecovery/comments/13i8lt8/sandisk_extreme_pro_ssd_just_disappeared_my/jr1smcx/. Haven’t had any other / hardware issues so far (and hopefully won’t).
Mine just failed. I just got an RMA to send it back. Better take care of that….
After how long? I have two thatve been good for years now
I bought it from B&H in September of 2021. I’d back those babies up if I were you.
RIP to all the Sandisk micro sd cards I have in my drones 💀
Likely not affected, by this issue at least.
That being said… SD cards are notoriously faillable and do not like to high read/write cycles. If you’re keeping data there long term, you shouldn’t be. It’s why most professional cameras come with two sd cards in case one fails.