Why do companies have to behave so shady š
Thereās arenāt a lot of manufacturers producing 512GB+ micro sd cardsā¦ not sure if Sandisk/WD is worth the risk after this news
I wonder how representative the Extreme portable drives are to their SD cards. SanDisk cards have always been extremely reliable. I assume the Extreme drives are fabricated in a different factory or even outsourced to some random Shenzhen plant. Worrying is the idea that theyāve done the same with SD cards.
Iāve owned SanDisk for years, before 2016 and after. I havenāt seen a quality difference in the products I use but I also havenāt personally owned this Extreme drive. Flash memory used to have abysmal lifespans, like really bad at long-term storage. Makes me wonder if these Extreme drives are using old tech to save WD their bottom dollar.
All the more reason for them to be transparent, name the problem, remove the affected stock from sale, set up some kind of recovery and/or compensation service, and write off the loss. Otherwise āSanDiskā will mean āyou have shit on your shoeā forever. In the storage space a brand has to mean āsafeā or its dead.
Maybe they are still finding the edges of the problem. Maybe.
These failures donāt have to do with where theyāre manufactured - it seems like this is some sort of firmware bug. NAND doesnāt really just choose to wipe itself at random. Actual NAND chip failures are few and far-between, so this is very likely much more than a hardware issue.
That said, I personally have done a lot of testing with WD-manufactured NAND, compared other companiesā NAND - and the WD NAND is pretty crap. I canāt really go into further details than that, though.
Source - Iām an SSD firmware engineer.
We assume WD isnāt outsourcing their firmware engineering. That could explain why theyāre so quiet.
This is not about microSD cards. This is about some very specific SSD USB hard drives.
Not sure why people would buy these from SanDisk anyway. I generally use Micron for SSDsā¦ they have made various solid state memory products for 20 or 30 years. Not sure where SanDisk came fromā¦ I have more heard about flash drives from them and have a bunch of small SD cards myself.
Iām aware of the difference. I was looking from the perspective of WDās recent track record, with things like advertising DM SMR drives as NAS drives when they arenāt suited as such - I wouldnāt put it past them to make decisions negatively affecting the quality of their subsidariesā other product segments
For SSDs I buy from any brand really - Sandisk, Crucial, Kingston, and occasionally knock off chinese brands. I like Micronās offerings (particularly the MX series with PLP capacitor backup and very generous NAND overprovisioning) but you pay a small premium for those.
Yes I should have said Crucial. That is the brand used by Micron. Just got an MX500, 1TB drive for my Wife.
Who are the big names for SSDs anyway. I mean ones that actually make them and sell them, not just brand them? I just recognize Micron/Crucial from the old days. They do memory chips of other kinds so I felt they should know had to do this sort of memory chipā¦ nothing moreā¦ do not know how people in the know rate them.
