There’s now a doable rationalization behind the SanDisk SSD failures which were an ongoing challenge all through most of 2023. The difficulty first gained discover on Reddit as customers complained of failing SSDs and the lack of knowledge.
The issue gained extra consideration when SanDisk’s guardian firm, Western Digital, turned topic to a number of class-action lawsuits in August, based on Ars Technica.
Nonetheless, stories of the failures started as early as Could 2023. Whereas SanDisk initially tried to treatment the failures with a firmware repair, the info restoration agency Attingo has decided that the treatment has not labored as a result of the problem is within the SSD {hardware}.
A number of failed SSDs named within the lawsuit embrace the next:
- SanDisk Excessive Moveable 4TB (SDSSDE61-4T00)
- SanDisk Excessive Professional Moveable 4TB (SDSSDE81-4T00)
- SanDisk Excessive Professional Moveable 2TB (SDSSDE81-2T00)
- SanDisk Excessive Professional Moveable 1TB (SDSSDE81-1T00)
- Western Digital My Passport 4TB (WDBAGF0040BGY).
In line with the Austrian web site Futurezone, Attingo decided that the SSDs suffered from insufficient design and manufacturing, which induced them to fail. Particularly, the soldering wasn’t robust sufficient to bond the elements to the circuit board. The elements had been additionally too massive, resulting in irregular connections and overheating, which might trigger bubbles to disturb the connection level, leading to misplaced information.
Western Digital’s treatment was to launch a brand new firmware replace; nonetheless, this proved to solely be a short lived resolution as the problem lay a lot deeper within the units. The corporate adopted up with new firmware, along with including a stronger epoxy resin to newer fashions of its SSD drives.
The corporate has not made an official assertion in regards to the matter and isn’t anticipated to talk up in regards to the challenge sooner or later.
Nonetheless, it has shared the next on its firmware replace webpage. “We addressed this firmware challenge within the manufacturing course of, and we will verify that the problem shouldn’t be impacting presently delivery merchandise.”
Attingo famous will probably be testing the firmware-updated fashions as a result of even with Western Digital’s distant restore efforts, the outsized elements may nonetheless be topic to failure. Western Digital additionally endured a extreme safety breach earlier this 12 months that allowed hackers to realize entry to non-public buyer data.
For now, these utilizing SanDisk SSDs may need to contemplate backup choices for particularly irreplaceable knowledge. Widespread cloud-based choices are Google One and Microsoft OneDrive.
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