“We just lost 3TB of data on a SanDisk Extreme SSD” - The Verge

What the fuck are all these comments?

It's an article about an unresolved and recurring problem with a popular drive that the ostensibly reputable manufacturer is trying to hide.

But 90% of the comments are people jerking themselves off about how smart they are for using RAID, which is irrelevant to the point of the article... But never miss an opportunity to pleasure yourself in public I guess?

This is exactly why I invested 250x the cost of one SSD into my raid setup. It's 100 SSD's in raid1 in a huge rack which slides vertically on 4 guide poles.

I sit under the contraption and lean forward as far as I can, before lowering it onto my back. This method allows me to suck my own cock with ease, so that I don't need to fellate myself on public forums

This is the best summary I could come up with:

This isn’t a drive he purchased many months or years ago — it’s the supposedly safe replacement that Western Digital recently sent after his original wiped his data all by itself.

SanDisk issued a firmware fix for a variety of drives in late May, shortly after our story.

But data recovery services can be expensive, and Western Digital never offered Vjeran any the first time it left him out to dry.

Honestly, it feels like WD has been trying to sweep this under the rug while it tries to offload its remaining inventory at a deep discount — they’re still 66 percent off at Amazon, for example.

Unfortunately, the broken state of the internet means Western Digital doesn’t have to work very hard to keep selling these drives.

I’d also like to say shame on CNET, Cult of Mac and G/O Media’s The Inventory for writing deal posts about this drive that don’t warn their readers at all.

I'm a bot and I'm open source!

redundancy is key

Ugh, I literally just fucking bought this drive

I’ve been telling people for years that the entire 21st century is at risk of being a lost century. Even personally I can’t guarantee my data will be with me 20 years from now even though I back it up. If you care about a photo or document, print it and throw it it a box. As I get older I find more of an obsession with physical media from a preservation point of view. Because I know my books and pictures will be around 50 years from now. Digital files not so much.

Yes, actually.

I do have multiple redundancy set up , but I've had many a sandisk drive fail, and a few wd my passports too. Now, the WDs were refurbs that I throw media on for the home network, or plugging into my shield, or like that. So I am never surprised when they just don't work one day.

But the sandisk were brand new, and failed within weeks. It made me give up on the brand entirely. I just don't like having to deal with my backups failing at that kind of rate. They are good about replacing them, but damn. I think I did two swaps on the one drive, three on another, and then just demanded a refund from the third. The one I use on my dad's computer was the triple fail, and we finally got one that's stayed working for a while now.

The other died after six months and I just trashed it and gave up.

I've also had horrible experiences with sandisk sd cards. They could be fakes, what with having bought them via amazon though.

I was today years old when I learned places like TheVerge are filled with idiots who keep work on USB media, keep no backups, and act like it's not their fault when something fails.

So they just had this one drive fail and they decided to make a big news article about it? Hardware fails sometimes. Just RMA the thing and shut the fuck up about it. Go build a gaming PC.

Randomly disconnects = chance for data loss

Though the filesystem plays a role. I have a full metal body Sandisk USB stick that still overheats after a while and then disconnects (has a heatsink on top now) but ext4 handles that fine. I know that Fat32 has no journaling and NTFS is a tad bit sensible to disconnects. Don't know about exfat.

Just throwing this out there for anyone shopping for storage drives. BackBlaze does a pretty good regular writeup on the drives they use and how they perform, how reliable they are, etc. It's very informative and a fun read (if you're into nerdy stuff).

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q2-2023/

We just lost 3TB of data because we didn't back it up and stored it on cheap NAND flash

FTFY

It's funny how the loss of storage space can be valued diffently. If it's 3TB of of video footage for a newspaper, that's weeks if not months of work and money lost. But it could also just be the last 3 Call of Duty's with patches.

I purchased a 2TB one of these SanDisk "extreme portable" drives in 2018, and 2 more 2TB drives in 2019. Purchased each one roughly 6 months apart. Knock on wood...so far no problems at all with any of the 3. But, drives do often fail (I've had several fail over the years). One general rule of thumb I have when shopping for drives is I never buy the model with the highest storage capacity for the product line. It's just a dumb superstition I have, but it seems like the higher capacity ones (like 3TB and above) are the ones that have failed on me in the past.

I use mine for desaster recovery.

Using tineshift to take hourly snapshots of my laptop computer.

I don't think my laptop and the drive fail at the same time so I think my use case is safe even with these risky drives.

What is the advantage of using this over an USB to SATA adapter?

I love fake product reviews. You can see the marketing speak just dripping off of them. I swear people in marketing can't control themselves when it comes to speaking like an ad.

"I trusted all my important data to a single point of failure and now I'm screwed".

So, yes, I respect that SanDisk's drive may have a manufacturing defect and that sucks but they have to share the blame for this. Seriously, drive mirroring is a thing and every single OS supports it out of the box. A proper RAID system is a thing and even better. Adding duplicate storage, be it cloud, another NAS or backing up to tape is even better still. It's the 21st century, you should know that by now if your literal job is based on storing data.

I know these comments are going to be full of people touting the virtues of having backup drives, NAS, or other high level data protection, but am I the crazy one? Knock on wood, I know nothing lasts forever, but I have decade+ old usb drives still going strong. How do they burn through so many externals?

All the hard drives I own are Sandisk and WD. I have Windows installed on a SanDisk SSD and Steam on another SanDisk SSD. My WD 4TB Blue HDD and WD 4TB Elements Portable HD are for back ups and both are 5 years old now. I haven't had any issues. Some of the Verge commentors do mention it could be a MacOS thing.

It's extremely hard to make, but I was hoping there's a review website with 100% real user review so this kind of issue can be discovered more easily

Oh, okay, they just lost 3TB 😋
Fiew ... it could have been 4.

BRB setting up sync for my OS drive!

That's why you don't trust refurbished media.

Got my gf a 2TB version. She also lost most of her files after 1 month of usage. She uses MacOS. But it's probably to some degree of personal failure. So not sure if this is relevant.

If the data doesn't matter: Put it on one drive.

If losing the data would cost you minor downtime: Put it on two drives (or storage arrays of some sort) in two locations.

If losing the data would cause major downtime: Put it on three drives (or storage arrays of some sort) in two or three locations.

If losing the data would cause life-disrupting issues for multiple people: Put it on as many drives as possible/feasible (or storage arrays of some sort) in enough locations that you can sleep well at night.

Edit: weird thing to get a bunch of downvotes, but you do what you want with your data

Ive had this drive for 2 years no issue

Bruh what?

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"There are two kinds of people: those of have lost data and those who are about to lose data."

Redundancy saves a lot of headaches.

I'm always for supporting new technologies, new companies, new ideas, but that does not mean I'm dropping everything to just get that brand new shiny stuff.

I see the concept and technology for SSDs as groubdbreaking and pretty awsome but I don't trust those drives to store data I don't want to lose. I still use good old fashioned HDDs: the tech is tried and tested, mature and reliable and very affordable.

I still use SSDs but I use them as not safe storage mediums, prone to break at any moment, without any warning.

And regardless of this I still keep several copies of important files and critical ones, if possible, are made physical.

And even then...

Read the opening sentence again.

This could have been a lemmy post than an “article.”

3tb of unprotected data? And it’s the 2nd time it’s happened? Raid1 has existed for a few years and seems pretty reliable.

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"I have a defective drive, therefore all drives are defective"

Storage can fail at any time, that's why important data should be backed up.

Dunno what more to expect from the Verge. Have they tried putting thermal paste on it?

"I put 3TB of irreplaceable data on a single drive, and want to blame anyone but myself for my data loss"

Go away with this garbage.

I personally have a NAS with 12TB striped over 3 drives, I sure wouldn't blame WD if one drive failed and I lost everything.

E: this whole comment section is why tech illiterate people shouldn't really comment on hardware failures like this. The only fact that is know is that the verge faced 2 drive failures and lost 3TB of data due to a lack of safe data storage practices. If they were tech literate they wouldn't have lost any data.

The verge did not confirm the mode of failure, and therefore the second failure could've been completely unrelated to the firmware issue. Nobody knows anything, other than the verge needs to educate themselves on how to properly store irreplaceable data.