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

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?
- Lemmy definitely showing the same symptoms as Reddit as it grows. Too many people trying to show off how technically smart they are and just come off as obnoxious dweebs
  
  I don't know why people think that this behavior would ever be restricted to Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.?
  There's one common element in all these systems...
  
  It's becoming more and more noticeable and it's making me sad.
  
  Downvote those dweebs
  
  Lemmy guess... this is your 2nd go with a social media platform?
  Lemmy sit you down on my knee son and let grandpa here explain how social media worked in his old times of facebook just like I sat on my grandpappys knee and he explained to me the days of AIM.
  /s
  
  And what's most important is you putting smart people down to make yourself feel superior to them
- I didn't believe you but yeeeeeesh. Lots of self righteous penises ITT. If people buy an expensive hard drive, it should work. Not everyone knows everything there is to know about data storage, have a little grace people
- What, you don't do RAID-6 and carry around 5 external USB drives to move your data between locations? It's just so convenient. 🤣
  Seriously, I don't get the raid comments at all.
  
  Of course I don't carry 5 external drives with me all the time, that would be ridiculous.
  I carry the whole HBA.
  
  Every1s doing it
- Lol this place is half a circle jerk of people who think they're certified geniuses for rejecting mainstream technology, tech hipsters. There was a thread about Google's "safe browsing" thing and most of the comments were just "iMaGiNe UsInG gOoGle!!*
- My only counter argument is that the verge article should also have stuck to the failures/defect, and either not mentioned their own dataloss, or at least mention possible mitigation strategies. I understand not everyone can do proper backups, but the verge can, and they should lead by example.
  As for a comment on the actual drive defect, this is probably one of those cases where you want to insist on a refund. If the problem is as widespread as claimed, then getting a new defective drive doesn't really help. WD/sandisk should just be recalling and refunding all devices. It's odd that tech stuff never seems to have recalls in the same way that cars do? They seem to just rely on individual RMAs.
  
  Aren't usually recalls mostly for cases where it would cause personal injuries and as such the damages to the company are far bigger than not doing the recall.
- Why is your comment with so many upvotes but I still had to scroll down to find it. Everything above is kinda morbid. Im glad I scrolled enough, was worried a bit 🤣
- Showing off my superior intellect is always relevant!
- Did you read the article? Because as far as I can see it fails to actually say shit about the problem. From just this article I can see why people are blaming the author for not having redundancy.
  The Arstechnica articles however do actually say what's going on, so yeah this appears to be a real issue with these drives disconnecting.
  
  Yes.
- But never miss an opportunity to pleasure yourself in public I guess?
  I mean I wasn't really in the mood but I'll rub one out just for you
- Then the article title should be less click bait termed and properly address that there's a major firmware fault in the drives.
  Journalism is lost on generating clicks and user turmoil rather than servicing the public in any way.
  
  The article does exactly that.
  
  Or read the article instead of just the headline.
  
  Or maybe people should actually read articles first instead of commenting based off just reading the “click bait“ headline?
- irrelevant to the point of the article
  What are you talking about? Of course it's relevant.
  Hard drives are unreliable, they always have been and they probably always will be.
  I've personally had three drives fail in the last 12 months - two HDDs and one SSD. And both of those were internal hard drives either in a data center or at least on a desk in a properly climate controlled office. All three of them were from far more reputable manufacturers than WD. I suspect none of those failures were the actual disk by the way pretty sure they were all chipset or firmware failures.
  Your solution doesn't have to be RAID, but it has to be something better than "I'll just keep this file on a single drive".
  WD should absolutely do better - but at the same time even if they did do better it still wouldn't be good enough. There shouldn't be any data loss when (not if) a drive fails.
  
  Stop focusing on the title. The lost data isn’t the point. The defect is the point.

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
- so that I don't need to fellate myself on public forums
  But you still do anyway, because you like the way it feels
  
  But he doesn’t HAVE TO
- I hope you're getting off on redundancy and not a backup. Because RAID.is.not.a.backup.
  
  (I can even gargle my balls)
  
  Raid doesnt even protect against bit rot either. It doesn't matter how many disks you write to even in a raid one array you are still vulnerable. Unless you have a high end raid card that does block level checksuming your raid array will not go back and verify previously written to data is still correct. If it does have checksuming it still isn't smart enough to know which drive is the is correct and will lock the array in the best case.

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!
- Good bot.

Ugh, I literally just fucking bought this drive
- I wonder if it'd be worth returning if you're still in the window. I don't know how common the issues are though. Maybe check out the Ars Technica article someone linked?
  
  Well I bought it for mass media storage for an upcoming trip. So I'll just see how it goes and consider options afterward
- I almost bought one because they were on huge sale at Amazon.
  
  Yeah, I wouldn’t suggest buying the huge sales at amazon for ssd’s.
  They probably pulled the bad drives back from merchant stock to avoid getting returns. Those frequently wind up on Amazon as huge sales.
- You're probably fine, all drives have failures and I haven't seen anything to indicate this is a widespread issue with the drive.
  
  The manufacturer has acknowledged it’s an issue and has issued at least one patched firmware. This isn’t a “luck of the draw” or isolated issue.

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.
- Did you read the article? Two drives, not one. In 3 months. By the same company. Who is aware of a problem, is trying to hide it, and pushed a firmware update that did not work. Also this second drive was a "safer" replacement the company sent the guy after the first one failed. I say an article about the whole situation is fully warranted
- Go build a gaming PC.
  Don't forget the table and to use a Swiss Army knife that hopefully has a screwdriver in it.
- Ragebait articles generate a lot of clicks ig.

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.
- Can't trust Amazon with shit nowadays. What's the point of sales if you get fake shit in the first place? I mean, Amazon is sleazy even without the common-binning but for a while they were good with their online shopping.
  Also, what data storage solutions do you use now? I'm considering just encrypting my stuff and uploading them to some paid cloud service - atleast then someone else smarter than me is responsible for making sure it's safe and accessible.
  
  I encrypt anything important and use Google for offsite cloud because I, luckily, only have text and a few gigabytes of images that I want the extra step of encryption for.
  Everything else, media and such that's hard to replace but not important gets put on a drive and swapped out monthly to my sister's house, and my best friend's house.
  Here, there's a drive on each PC with that stuff, plus whatever is on the individual PC that gets moved to those drives. I'd have to go look for which is where though. But that's five copies that I update from my main PC as I get new stuff, so they get moved around a good bit. And there's a backup that is held as a spare.
  But, all my files for the stuff I write are also synced to Dropbox and gdrive hourly when I'm writing, and again at the end of a session. During each session, its autosaved every five minutes because I'm a tad lazy and don't like rewriting things I just wrote because there's a power issue out here in the boonies. UPS might be an option, but I don't always write on the same thing.
  I don't like Google any more, and don't trust any of the "cloud" services as far as I can spit, but they are stable. I've never lost anything from the major services, and the free tiers are enough for my needs of important stuff.

redundancy is key
- redundancy is key
  
  redundancy is key
  
  LOL

- Someone didn’t read the story. This is about a known firmware fault that the company is doing its best not to keep quiet. Don’t help them in that work
  
  They should’ve made a better headline
- Single point of failure.. surprised pikachu?
  
  The use case for these drives is always a single point of failure. It's camera footage out in the field. You have to get it home before you have proper storage.
  Do you have a dashcam for your vehicle? Do you have backups before you get the footage home?

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.
- My external SSD I put together with a “nice” enclosure started dropping to 5MB/s on any machine. I don’t trust most external SSDs anymore.
  I DO trust my RPi case with built-in m.2 USB adapter thingy, as it’s running full speed in that thing, no issues with speed dropping.
  
  I'd like to know more about this adapter thingy.
- I use an Asus enclosure and put in a WD ssd. The heat dissipation is better than the sandisk model and it stays connected pretty much always except during travels
  
  Eh, wait, so it's heath related? Defective firmware causing overheating or too low limits?
- It's my biggest peeve with owning this SSD. I can leave it over a weekend and come back to, no lie, 50+ disconnect notifications from MacOS. Shoddy software to say the least...

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?

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

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
- reviewmeta tries to do this with Amazon reviews

BRB setting up sync for my OS drive!

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
- This is pretty good advice. I don't get why the downvotes.
- Yep, this is the way.

Ive had this drive for 2 years no issue
- That's great
- Read the article before commenting. You got lucky.
- Good for you?

Bruh what?

3tb of unprotected data? And it’s the 2nd time it’s happened? Raid1 has existed for a few years and seems pretty reliable.
- Do you have a portable video camera that supports raid 1?
  
  Lots of people in this thread bitching and moaning, not realizing what it means working with hundreds of gigs of video data a day
- Try decades. Raid 1 has been around since the 70’s raid 5 since ‘86

"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.”

"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?
- Are you willing to accept an article from Ars Technica? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/sandisk-extreme-ssds-keep-abruptly-failing-firmware-fix-for-only-some-promised/
  Do you think it's not newsworthy if a manufacturer sells drives with a history of failures, releases a firmware update they claim will fix the issue, sends a replacement drive that also fails, and continues to sell the drives at a deep discount?
  
  The news can be legit and the Verge can suck simultaneously.
  
  It's definitely newsworthy, and the ars article is at least a bit more balanced. My main issue is the "I trusted my data to a single USB device, and was then furious when it died" clickbait. These journalists should know better than to store critical data in a single place.
  If you can't RMA the drives then that is a bigger problem, but that comes down to the consumer protection laws you have in your country.
  
  OP should have posted this one, not that The Verge crap.
- Did like none of y'all read the article?
  
  We truly are on a Reddit clone.
  
  I did read it, and that was the point that jumped out at me as worth commenting on.
  The rest of the WD RMA fuckery wasn't really that unexpected, although definitely disappointing. If the article had focused on that I wouldn't even have commented.
  I have since found out that these drives are used as the storage for some video cameras, which is definitely a use case where backups are not feasible, and maybe that is what happened to the Verge.
  But in all other uses, we should strive to have backups for our data, and given most people don't backup correctly (myself included) it's always worth having a reminder of the that.. And to be clear, I'm not saying you need to have RAID99 zfs, even a second disk with a manual copy could save a ton of heartache and stress.
- In the article they point out their first drive failed and sandisk replaced it. Now the replacement is dying in the same way. And the drive just so happens to be on clearance now, as if they’re trying to clear out stock.
  Also, it’s an SSD, so it’s not a mechanical failure.
  
  SSDs can fail at random as well. Often with less warning. It's definitely newsworthy that there are lots of these failures, but the "We lost 3tb of data" angle is bullshit. The correct response to a USB drive dying should be "Bummer, RMA it, and get a copy from the NAS/cloud/resilient storage"
- I’d expect cum from them

- You also need some moral ground before you shame others. the verge does not have it.
  
  I mean, the article bit they quote is kinda crazy:
  “I haven’t tested the SanDisk 4TB Extreme Portable SSD, but I have used many SanDisk products over the decades. The company built a reputation for quality products that, in my experience, it deserves.”
  Also, why would the Verge not have moral high ground? They are one of the most respected tech sites around

"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.
- The claim here seems to be that the product has an unusual failure rate, the manufacturer has acknowledged the original problem and released a fix, and it does not appear to be fixed. I don't read it as a sob story about some reporter's lost data.
  
  Given the verges track record on tech reporting, i wouldn't put faith in their journalistic integrity of a hit piece unless they show a bit more than "look, i lost a drive after they said they fixed the issue. They're lying!"
- Ooh ooooh look at me everybody I'm so much smarter than this IDIOT that expected the devices he PAID FOR to work as advertised and the company to be honest and straightforward with firmware issues and updates
  I run this better system than NORMIES and even if it fails (because I'm an idiot) I DONT CARE ABOUT THE DATA on them because iT DiDn'T mATteR tO Me iN tHe fIrSt PlAcE.
  PS For people wondering about the second paragraph, check this guy's other comments in this thread.
- Hence why RAID5 is so popular!
  
  Correct. My next build will be redundant but given that my truenas pool is only storing movies, shows, music and porn, I don't much care if I lose the contents due to a drive failure
- ~~Let's see you bring your raid NAS on an out of country video shoot.~~
  Edit: Misread the comment. My reply isn't addressing the actual point he made.
- These drives have a very different use case than a rack mount NAS. They're portable ruggedized devices for field use, like dumping content from your camera so you can keep shooting. Two would be better but it sounds like a known flaw that is causing random, frequent losses.
- I hope you are using a UPS or some form of offline storage if you really can't afford to loose your data.
  
  I said I couldn't care about the data, which is the only reason why I'm running a striped pool