“We just lost 3TB of data on a SanDisk Extreme SSD” - The Verge
“We just lost 3TB of data on a SanDisk Extreme SSD” - The Verge
Anyone else have a similar experience with one of these drives?
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
Downvote those dweebs
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.
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 🤣
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
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.
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.
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
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.
redundancy is key
redundancy is key
redundancy is key
Even more redundancy
LOL
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.
I used to think this, but now, less so.
I agree with you in general, as most people don't use physical media. However, those of us that do, are probably pretty secure in our legacy.
I have digital files that have been with me for over a quarter of a century, first through repeated copies to new media formats, then to more sophisticated backup systems. In the past few years, I've been alternating backing up to cloud services and then to local USB disks; the backup program is a statically compiled, monolithic program with few dependencies. Recently, I found a solution to the encrypted restore by survivors. I even have a README with instructions.
I'm secure in the knowledge that my 3TB of painstakingly curated collection of foot porn will be available to future researchers, for the betterment of mankind.
Thank you for your service !
We're in the presence of greatness 🫡
Redundancy. I have 4 drives and the older two drives are always a backup of music and media. I can lose all the save games and softwares since they'll be outdated anyways but memories need to be preserved.
The kind of media I don't have backup of is from my Handycam tapes since they no longer make the software and I don't know how to digitize them in any other way.
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.
LOCKSS and KISS, though. Flash chips don't last forever but are pretty durable, and so are optical media as long as they're the right material. SSDs decay and HDDs fail, but for magnetic platter media even if the head or motor crashes there's always the old magnetic microscope in a pinch. USB's not going anywhere, and if you have four or five copies that you don't completely neglect and don't store in the same physical place, presumably you'll have the chance to notice and take corrective measures if any of them start failing or are at risk.
I don't actually know that an individual book or picture will still be around in 50 years; Fire, flooding, insects, acidic paper, low-quality ink maybe— Digital stuff's fragile, but so is physical stuff. Stick it in the attic, and the heat'll speed up any chemical reactions and probably make it cozier for insects; Stick it in the basement, and the condensation will get you mildew and rot. By contrast, having a flash drive accidentally survive a trip through a washer and dryer is a pretty common occurrence, and I've yet to lose a drive even with that level of negligence. Material compatibility's one of the very most basic parts of a set of very precise manufacturing techniques, tin whiskers seem pretty rare these days, the really scarily insidious stuff like hydrogen embrittlement is super improbable, and most biological forms of decay haven't adapted to eating cured epoxy and monocrystalline silicon yet.
At least I sorta know how a flash cell or hard drive platter is meant to be structured; Who knows what weird organic reactions and unstable or slowly diffusing molecules are happening in the pile of chemical pigments on a sheet of likely-acidic bleached cellulose and cheap ink or toner, and whether it will still be legible to human eyes in however many years? Plus, a printed photo or document starts fading the very instant it's created, and it gets a little worse every time you touch it with sweaty human hands or look at it while exhaling moist human breath and corrosive enzymatic saliva droplets under a white LED lamp or G-type star shooting out ionizing UV rays. Digital failures tend to be catastrophic, but at least up until the moment it fails, you can make sure that it is the exact same picture or text— And you can make many, many copies very cheaply, all of them very physically durable compared to paper, and know that they are all the exact same picture and text.
That said, I absolutely agree with your overall assessment that most of the information in the early 21st century, including most of the public Internet/WWW, most likely either will be or already is… Maybe not technically lost, per se, given how much caching and saving happens on private clients, but certainly rendered inaccessible.
Ideally I'd really love to see a return of microfiche, actually, using modern polymers and metallization. I've been meaning to look into that for a while now. At a reasonable scale for optical viewing, you could fit… much, much more content than you might expect, and do it several times over, in an entirely reasonable number of pages. Your comment actually spurred me to finally think of a practical way of printing that— for years before, I'd been trying to idly figure out a process based on photomasks and nanoparticles suspended in resin, which had always felt like a very messy and tricky idea, but I just thought of another idea– So thanks for providing some inspiration there.
This is a hot take
Even data from the Apollo missions was found to be either degrading (tapes) or the formats were forgotten and the systems that could read them were gone. They had to do research into rediscovering how to read the data and hunt around for the few antique systems remaining to read the tapes.
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.
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.
They also think it’s newsworthy when they experience one hardware failure. How nice to have a platform to shout your own personal grievances from.
iVerge has been on the decline for nearly a decade now.
I'm surprised anyone takes them seriously at this point.
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.
Dude, I think you're way too into the tech space if you think a website publishing an article about some bad ssds can be misconstrued as rage bait.
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.
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...
Ok, that's far too much.
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.
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/
NAS w/ RAID...
"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 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.
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 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.
That is exactly the type of content LLMs were designed to excel at generating.
That is exactly the type of content LLMs were designed to excel at generating.
Hm. It's also exactly the kind of disingenuousness that that humans have spent a couple million years evolving to try to detect, though.
I wonder if the LLMs are going to win this. Maybe more likely: When everyone realizes that the entire Internet is being flooded with even more bullshit, we'll just stop trusting it, and the LLMs will more or less have put themselves out of a job.
It would be funny if the propensity for humans to lie to each other meant that we were basically already inoculated from this terrifying new category of machines that we've designed to lie to us too.
What is the advantage of using this over an USB to SATA adapter?
You don't have to deal with using a USB to SATA adapter and the drive has a built in enclosure so you can just shove it into a bag or pocket
Is no one mentioning the speed, it can easily go 500+ mbps even with older gen type c ports.
Great if you're working on large files or installing games even.
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?
I think selection bias is part of it, we tend to hear from the folks who run into issues more than the folks who don't. I also think a drive that sits on a desktop or in a drawer most of the time in an air-conditioned house will last much longer than one that's often thrown into a bag and transported in vehicles, airports, etc.
Right, we need more positive articles like "We just didn't lose 3TB of data on a Sandisk SSD!... Yep, the data is still there!"
Chances are your decade old USB sticks didn't go through as much read/write operations as those 3tb ssds
Maybe not. I don't mean sticks though, I mean full size mechanical external drives. Not even solid state. On my 3TB, I've probably done about 10TB of writes (video backup, transfers, etc)
They may have been doing video editing on it. That can be a good amount of read/writes that will wear down a drive.
Vjeran is a supervising producer of a tech site. He should know to back shit up. I'm sure a site as big as The Verge has decent cloud backup.
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.
That's why you don't trust refurbished media.
Don't trust media, period.
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
Oh, okay, they just lost 3TB 😋
Fiew ... it could have been 4.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.
Is this an issue with MacOS? Even the comment section in the article keeps mentioning that it happens on MacOS.
It's a standard USB device. It interacts with MacOS only via the USB bus, following the standard/spec. If it craps its pants and fails catastrophically when it receives specific, valid USB commands, then it doesn't matter whether it's only MacOS or TempleOS that sends the commands that trigger that particular failure case. It's still the drive's fault, because it's failing to do its literal one and only job of safely storing your data over USB.
E.G.: If MacOS can trigger the failure now, then there's no guarantee that any future update to Windows or Linux won't also trigger the same failure.
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
I got a SanDisk Passport for Christmas maybe 10 years ago, it's only like 500gb, but going strong! I do have redundancies though
Read the article before commenting. You got lucky.
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?
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?
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.
I’d expect cum from them
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.
"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.
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.
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.
God you guys are all dense.
When did I say a NAS was the correct solution here? I'm just pointing out that I'm not absolved from poor data storage practices. But that I'm only doing it becauss I don't care about the data.
The verge should know better, and including anything about their lost data in this shows they have no journalistic integrity. They simply want to pull your heartstrings for a hit piece with no actual proof. Reports the news, with proof that WD didn't fix the issue. Don't report that you suck at training your employees.
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.
God you guys are all dense.
When did I say a NAS was the correct solution here? I'm just pointing out that I'm not absolved from poor data storage practices. But that I'm only doing it becauss I don't care about the data.
The verge should know better, and including anything about their lost data in this shows they have no journalistic integrity. Reports the news, with proof that WD didn't fix the issue. Don't report that you suck at training your employees.
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