44 points

Welcome to your self-wiping stock price WD.

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41 points

They’re under active litigation, why would they comment about something that they are being sued over? It’s obviously a huge legal issue. Not saying they should just stick to their narrative because they’re obviously wrong, but what are we supposed to expect? They’re not going to give up evidence by publicly releasing details.

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36 points

They were sued on Tuesday. If you follow the timeline the question were sent in the week before. This has been going on months. Their lack of answers doesn’t have anything to do with the litigation and the company doesn’t cite litigate as the reason for not answering

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9 points

Prior to a public lawsuit, they were probably still in damage control mode and still wouldn’t have disclosed a lot. That’s pretty standard million dollar corporation shit.

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12 points

I know a bit about damage control. Carrying on selling the stuff and stonewalling questions would not be in most company’s damage control play books. It does nothing to protect reputation and does actually control any damage.

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6 points

It’s definitely not unlikely they knew these class-action suits were in the works long before they were formally filed. A lot of times these are not a surprise to a company with a massive legal team.

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4 points

In which case you get your damage control under way before a case is formally bought.

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22 points

I was so confused about why both WD and SanDisk were mentioned but I know they are just the same company now?

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9 points
18 points
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16 points

Why do companies have to behave so shady 😔

There’s aren’t a lot of manufacturers producing 512GB+ micro sd cards… not sure if Sandisk/WD is worth the risk after this news

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10 points

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 they’ve done the same with SD cards.

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16 points

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 “SanDisk” will mean “you have shit on your shoe” forever. In the storage space a brand has to mean “safe” or its dead.

Maybe they are still finding the edges of the problem. Maybe.

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7 points

These failures don’t have to do with where they’re manufactured - it seems like this is some sort of firmware bug. NAND doesn’t 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 companies’ NAND - and the WD NAND is pretty crap. I can’t really go into further details than that, though.

Source - I’m an SSD firmware engineer.

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2 points

We assume WD isn’t outsourcing their firmware engineering. That could explain why they’re so quiet.

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2 points
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2 points

I’ve owned SanDisk for years, before 2016 and after. I haven’t seen a quality difference in the products I use but I also haven’t 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.

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2 points

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 SSDs… they have made various solid state memory products for 20 or 30 years. Not sure where SanDisk came from… I have more heard about flash drives from them and have a bunch of small SD cards myself.

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2 points

I’m aware of the difference. I was looking from the perspective of WD’s recent track record, with things like advertising DM SMR drives as NAS drives when they aren’t suited as such - I wouldn’t put it past them to make decisions negatively affecting the quality of their subsidaries’ other product segments

For SSDs I buy from any brand really - Sandisk, Crucial, Kingston, and occasionally knock off chinese brands. I like Micron’s offerings (particularly the MX series with PLP capacitor backup and very generous NAND overprovisioning) but you pay a small premium for those.

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2 points

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 chip… nothing more… do not know how people in the know rate them.

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