Has anyone else been reading about the failing sandisk extreme drives?
(just curious)
Which? There are many models of both usb sticks and usb external boxes with this extreme models.
Cheers,
Great Northern aka Canada.
It's their external SSDs. They were in the news for suddenly becoming unreadable, and the high-capacity (multi-terabyte) versions were the worst.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/sandi … against-wd-say/
I dodged that by being a cheap-ass and getting a Crucial X8 instead.
I was going to get another but I got scared off by all the bad reviews. I got a Samsung T7 shield instead. My initial impression is that the build quality is much better. Was it too much trouble for the Sandisk to have an indicator light? Also, the sandisk was warm *all the time* whereas the T7 is cold with no activity...
This has been a bad year for Western Digital. First is was the issue of SMR drives, and now it is the SanDIsk issue
I haven't felt the same about SanDisk since I found out they are owned by Western Digital
I remembered the SMR controversy being older than that. My main computer has an SMR drive in it (and a Seagate, which makes it double-hated).
My only experience with SanDisk is cheap flash drives and SD cards that were unusually slow. You can still buy a USB 2.0 flash drive with only 3MB/s sequential read/write speeds, but modern capacities and the same price as low-end USB 3.0 drives. Of course, they're Amazon's Choice, so they must be good. I also bought one of SanDisk's own low-end USB 3.0 drives (a Flair) for an OS install or Linux live drive, and it gets incredibly hot. It's almost too hot to hold onto for the amount of time it takes to unplug it.
I also have a pretty low opinion of Samsung consumer products, so I was surprised to hear that Samsung's external SSDs are heavily used in professional photography. I guess external SSDs aren't really consumer products, so Samsung builds them to a higher standard.
It is getting to where it is hard to know what storage to trust.
I have had quite a few western digital passports fail....well they didn't exactly fail but they got slower and slower and sloooooooooooooower.. A transfer might start out at 30 MB/s but then drop down to 25, then 20, then 15...and when it gets to ten or below why bother. At that point they tend to have a violent encounter with the sidewalk before going in the trash.
The best external magnetic drives I have are some old Toshiba ones from roughly ten years ago and they still work perfectly. I wish I could get more like those (actually I did, off ebay)
Now we have SMR, and I thought the SanDisk SSD drives were good but now I wouldn't touch one.
Recently I got to of the Samsung T7 shield drives...so far I like those!
There is something going on at WD.....first it was the SMR drives and now failing SanDisk extreme. Why do I think MBAs are to blame. When will these companies learn...it is better not to cut corners. They might have made some more profit short-term but they will pay for it ten times in the long run with lost trust in the brand.