Originally published at: Western Digital still selling defective Sandisk-brand SSDs that it refuses to answer questions about | Boing Boing
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Western Digital still selling defective Sandisk-brand SSDs that it refuses to answer questions about
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Back in the old days, at least you got real bricks in the boxes.
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It’s probably a bad sign that we’ve all had a sufficient dose of the “It’s not use, we’re just running a marketplace here” that the retailers cheerfully continuing to carry them is barely part of the story.
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Ugh. I thought WD and SanDisk were reliable brands. But this doesn’t sound like just a bad batch, or even a bad model. A good company would be able to own up to those things, and steer customers to other models while they fix the problems. This sounds like bad corporate culture, which is likely to infect their other products, too.
I’m very disappointed. Unless they come clean about what’s going on and how they’re going to prevent it in the future, I’ll be avoiding WD products now.
It’s also a good reminder to have multiple copies of any data you care about.
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I’d love to see a law passed where lawyers can only collect a certain nominal percentage of a class action suit. I feel like it might incentivize the victims slightly more to take part. Knowing that you might only get a $3 check isn’t terribly motivating.
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Hear! Hear! i’ve got a ad-hoc RAID box in the corner that was initially seagate drives, but then some time ago it was deemed that WD were oh-so-much more reliable, so now it’s all WD drives. Even in the corporate world it’s so often “The cover-up is the crime”; that is, we will (eventually) forgive a “whoops, our series XYZ suffers a critical fault”, but we’ll never trust a company which unaccountably persists in deluding its customers.
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SanDisk seems to be a bit of an iffy brand lately. Tried using one of their thumbdrives (along with one of the Walmart brand ones) to convert an old netbook into a chromebook. Finally got it to stick with a Samsung brand drive ha
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Western Digital haven’t admitted that their drives are problematic … but they have dramatically reduced the prices, so you can now buy the same models that people have been having problems with for half the previous price. What a bargain!
That actually seems like a particularly dumb move on their part. If you’re looking down the barrel of a class action lawsuit, the very last thing you want to do is to increase the size of the class.
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It seems that WD is carrying high debt vs earnings. If they don’t smooth this out soon, they could be in real trouble.
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I’m too busy being alarmed by all the “reviewers” who gave it high scores, only some of them admitting that they never actually reviewed it, but all clearly just making assumptions based entirely on the reputation of the brand. (Which works only so well… until you have a product like this, that kills the company’s reputation.)
When you have “neutral” marketplaces that allow defective products (and outright scam products*) to be sold, you rely entirely on reviews to navigate them. Except that the “customer” reviews are swamped out by fraudulent paid reviews and the “professional reviewers” don’t even bother.
*E.g. that drive that had only a fraction of the storage it claimed it did, and would over-write earlier saved files when you exceeded the actual capacity, all a deliberate part of the design.
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It’s like the internet has simultaneously killed retail and journalism.
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I’ve become increasingly alarmed that the enshittification of the web is actually making my life noticeably worse in material ways.
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Damn. I have a couple of the smaller drives which I use for short term backups when I’m travelling. So far, no problems, but now I’ll have to keep an eye on them.
A shame, I really liked the tough shells and firm factor with the ability to clip them to my camera bag, but I won’t be buying Sandisk SSDs again…
And it better not spread to their SD cards. There aren’t many reliable brands out there - Lexmark are junk and Sony is far too expensive,
Ack, I have one of those and use it regularly!
Most of the brands are just rebadges, there are not that many NAND manufacturers.
The following were the largest NAND flash memory manufacturers, as of the second quarter of 2023.[26]
Samsung Electronics – 31.4%
Kioxia – 20.6%
Western Digital Corporation – 12.6%
SK Hynix – 18.5%
Micron Technology – 12.3%
Others – 8.7%Note: SK Hynix acquired Intel’s NAND business at the end of 2021[27]
Kioxia spun out and got renamed of Toshiba in 2018/2019.[28]
Do Lexmark make SDs? There is Lexar, but they came out of Micron and are usually liked for a budget brand. I think they make their own NAND now.
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You may be surprised to learn that nothing stops you from opting out of any class action you’re a part of if you believe it isn’t fairly compensating you for your injury. You are perfectly free to retain your own lawyer and pursue your own individual case.
You also may (or may not) be surprised to learn that most corporations love your idea of capping attorneys’ fees and severely limiting the upside for lawyers suing giant corporations.
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