• 𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    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

    • astraeus@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Artemisia@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • Doombot1@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        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.

          • Doombot1@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            I’d personally be super surprised if they were outsourcing their firmware engineering - but I do suppose it’s technically possible.

      • mooncabbage@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        That’s funny because I haven’t touched one of their cards in a while since 3 in a row failed on me.

        • astraeus@programming.dev
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          1 year ago

          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.

    • flatbield@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • 𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • flatbield@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          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 how to do this sort of memory chip… nothing more… do not know how people in the know rate them.