I'm really furious at this. I bought a bunch in the past two years as that's my go-to brands for my backup solutions. And in the past week, had to buy different brands to diversify.
My main takeaway:
Don't buy SanDisk. Don't buy Western Digital.
I don't care if it's only a few models. I'm not risking my data.
WD got in trouble not too long ago for deceptively marketing shingled drives as conventional. Back to back issues like this is going to leave a lasting impression on the kinds of people who buy drives.
And frankly, your data should never be in question. Short of a drive failure where the whole drive dies, which would require data recovery services, your data should be safely stored. IMO that's the premise of data storage; and bluntly, it's the only job it has... To store, keep, and retrieve data when asked.
If it cannot do that, or has any nontrivial risk of being unable to do that, then it's not worth the plastics that make up the case. Unless you're using the drive as a temp/scrub/whatever disk, it's unusable in my opinion.
Samsung has been hit or miss. For example EVO 840 were a mess a few years ago, had two of them, both slowed to a crawl (Firmware issue, Samsung never managed to fix it).
Ye definitely hit or miss, they've been excellent for me. I got the 970 EVO last year or the year before and it's been rock solid, my RAM is also Samsung chips albeit B die so higher bin which probably explains why I've never had a single issue with them in 4 odd years.