This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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/
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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...
I use an Asus enclosure and put in a WD ssd. The heat dissipation is better than the sandisk model and it stays connected pretty much always except during travels
Eh, wait, so it's heath related? Defective firmware causing overheating or too low limits?
Haven't had that issue, but definitely design related. Mine is a Asus rog enclosure which has better heatsink than sandisk
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.
That's why you don't trust refurbished media.
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.
This could have been a lemmy post than an “article.”
Bruh what?
Ive had this drive for 2 years no issue
Read the article before commenting. You got lucky.
Good for you?
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
"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?
Did like none of y'all read the article?
We truly are on a Reddit clone.
They don't send their best...
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.
"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.
