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SanDisk Extreme SSDs keep abruptly failing–firmware fix for only some promised
- bb88 3y agoI'm thinking maybe the Gamer's Nexus approach might work well here, where they buy failed hardware to do an autopsy on it -- and then publish the results of it on youtube as they recently have done for the ASUS high end motherboards that cook the AMD chips. It allows the the media companies access to the failed hardware to do their own autopsy on it, and it saves the users from needing to go through a painful RMA process, complicated by companies not willing to admit fault.
- mey 3y agoSide note, it wasn't just ASUS motherboards. Just ASUS had their additional issues and poor response.
- javchz 3y agoYep, Asus main issue was the miscommunication text of "update the bios to not hurt your chip, but btw if you do this you lose your warranty" was the icing on the cake for bad PR. But apparently it's more of a 7000 3D series chips issue.
- wnevets 3y agoAccording to Gamers Nexus their main issue was shitty BIOS which was a different problem than the X3D issues. Their horrible response was just another fail on their part.
- neilv 3y agoI hope Asus straightens out their customer focus. I really like that they're offering ECC on consumer boards.
- vxNsr 3y agoI thought that was an AMD thing. That all consumer cpus supported ECC.
- neilv 3y agoThis sounds like it varies based on motherboard and possibly CPU/APU: https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/lh3m42/demystifying_ryzen_ecc_support/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/lh3m42/demystifying_ry...
- bb88 3y agoAs noted by Gamer's Nexus, VSOC was wildly high on the ASUS motherboard. So, I stand by my statement. https://youtu.be/kiTngvvD5dI?t=1564 https://youtu.be/kiTngvvD5dI?t=1564
- kevincox 3y agoI feel like this was a bit too aggressive backlash for this. I think they should be allowed to release a beta BIOS without warranty support. I get that it is very enticing if the old BIOS may fry your system but technically it seems better in every way. - Gets it out early for third-party verification such as these YouTube channels that are doing testing. - Keeps it transparent that they are still working on the issue. - Allows them to experiment with more exotic BIOS (in the general case). Maybe what is missing is some sort of message like "This is an early preview, we are still doing internal verification before we can provide a stable release with a fully warranty"? Also IIRC the phrasing was "installing this will void your warranty" which is not true. It would have been better if they were clear that "damage done to your hardware by non-stable BIOS are not covered by warranty".
- whitemary 3y agoThe "high end" PC parts market comprises such a horrendous pit of garbage. The only way to know if anything even works to begin with is to read all (poorly written) manuals front to back taking notes, then procure the rest of the parts and rigorously test them yourself within all of their 30 day return windows. And even then you're virtually guaranteed to miss some glaring issue. Just last week, an obscure forum post from someone who already went through the tech support/RMA gamut saved me from wasting a month + $5K on a build with a motherboard that doesn't support sleep mode, which the manufacturer ASRock doesn't mention anywhere.
- miahi 3y agoYeah, the sleep is a mess with new hardware (and MS also does not help, with the new OS sleep). I have a "creator"-targeted MB from Gigabyte and it does sleep, but if it wakes up immediately after I put it to sleep (because of a mouse move), it does a series of 7-8 BIOS initalizations/restarts and it resets the full BIOS in the process.
- whitemary 3y agoThis issue was with the ASRock WRX80 Creator R2.0, so I got the R1.0 version instead. Now I'm wondering if it resets the bios on wake.
- shocks 3y agoIf on Linux you can try: https://askubuntu.com/questions/252743/how-do-i-prevent-mouse-movement-from-waking-up-a-suspended-computer/265389#265389 https://askubuntu.com/questions/252743/how-do-i-prevent-mous... Ymmv
- tinglymintyfrsh 3y agoRealize the marketing and support (likely none) of retail parts like these: manufacturers don't believe enterprise customers will not scream at them if some or many of them fail. They can play fast-and-loose to push the boundaries to get marketshare. Big name vloggers and tech reporters may complain. OTOH, enterprise parts are built and supported towards conservatism and reliability. There is crossover and a spectrum between the 2, but this case isn't a complete surprise.
- short_throw 3y agoI'm 2 for 2 with SanDisk ssds suddenly dieing due to the controller going out way short of the drive's expected life. That was years before this issue but my rule of never buying a SanDisk product again is serving me well.
- csdvrx 3y agoSandisk "industrial" SD cards are the only ones that have died on me (and no, they didn't come from Amazon but from a reliable source)
- flyinghamster 3y agoI've had equally bad luck with SanDisk's MicroSD cards. Samsung cards rarely ever go out to lunch in my Raspberry Pi systems, but I've never had a SanDisk card last more than six months. As (sometimes six-year-old) Samsung cards get retired, I've gone to... Samsung. This time, I'm getting their cards intended for surveillance cameras and other write-intensive duty.
- yftsui 3y agoI bought 3 Samsung EVO 256G cards last year for a dash cam, all of them failed around 36 days - no return but just warranty with Samsung. Samsung’s customer service for storage products is pretty bad that there is not even a website to submit a warranty claim. Switched to Sandisk then it has not failed after a year, I probably will never buy Samsung cards.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoYou're buying counterfeits.
- bombcar 3y agoThis is a much larger problem than people realize and it’s getting harder and harder to avoid them. I may end up buying SD cards at the local farm and game store for the trail cameras because hopefully nobody is counterfeiting those.
- 7speter 3y agoJeesh bought a crucial drive last year and then the firmware bug thing happened, so instead of buying another crucial drive, I bought a sandisk (ultra sata) drive and now this happens. None of the first party nand makers seem to be immune from these nand killing firmware bugs, not even samsung. Actually, I take that back. Maybe solidigm/SKHynix?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- whitepoplar 3y agoI'd read through this thread before purchasing an SK Hynix SSD: https://twitter.com/xenadu02/status/1495693475584557056?s=20 https://twitter.com/xenadu02/status/1495693475584557056?s=20
- JohnBooty 3y agoPretty much any brand has had some issues here and there. If you actually want a durable SSD, your best bet is probably to buy "new old stock" of a model that is 1-3 years old and has proven to be reliable. Of course, it's not always easy to gauge the reliability of a product based on forum posts. A popular product that is 99.9% reliable will... still have thousands of unhappy people crying on forums if they sell millions of units. In the end, you should probably just have some kind of daily (or better) backup system so that it's not a huge deal if your drive kicks the bucket. That probably makes more sense than obsessing over reliability in a world in which we as consumers don't have much insight into actual failure rates.
- lastdong 3y agoBought a nvme SSD and failed after 3 months of use. Read similar occurrences in reviews amazon. It was a Crucial P3, now reading about Sandisk. Storage (from well known brands) used to be the most reliable component. Not sure what is going on, but feels like quality control is not as good.
- zokier 3y agoStorage has been always a crapshoot. Deathstars, intel 8mb bug, failing barracudas, sandforce bugs, the list is endless.
- ilyt 3y agoWe even seen Intel enterprise SSDs die like month after warranty, with 98% life left...
- JohnBooty 3y agoWow... huh? I don't know about that. Been into personal computers since the 80s and it seems like storage has always failed orders of magnitude more often than anything else.
- bombcar 3y agoStorage failures are memorable everything else is easily replaced.
- JohnBooty 3y agoWhat other major PC component actually fails on a regular basis? Batteries and fans, I guess. Everything else doesn't really fail unless the user does something silly (toasting it via overclocking/overvolting) or a capacitor leaks. Spinning-rust HDDs used to fail a lot because they were well, moving parts with incredibly small tolerances and computers get banged around sometimes. It's kind of funny that SSDs carried on the tradition of failure despite not having moving parts.
- whitepoplar 3y agoJust my own experience, but I have a 1TB SanDisk Extreme V2 which was made several years ago. It routinely gets so hot that it nearly burns my skin to the touch, and when it does get that hot, it randomly unmounts from my computer. Last week, my SuperDuper backup to the drive failed due to underlying corruption, which strangely passed Disk Utility's health checks. I'm so done with this product.
- danparsonson 3y agoTry a heatsink next time
- whitepoplar 3y agoIt's a portable drive covered in rubberized plastic.
- r0l1 3y agoUse a Portal case with heatsink. You'll find some cases on amazon.
- Tempest1981 3y agoDo you have a model # or more info? Amazon search isn't finding "Portal" (except mid-tower). Google finds a mini-ITX case. The SanDisk is roughly the size of a credit card, maybe 1 x 5 x 10 cm
- winrid 3y agoI have bad luck with buying products that have Extreme or Fatality in the name...
- flyinghamster 3y agoIndeed, anything that has a "gamer" vibe to it has become suspect for me. I'm not interested in eking out that last smidgen of speed if it comes at the cost of reliability. With Asus, I'd go for the corporate stable motherboards rather than the gamer models.
- userbinator 3y agoThis is the result of an industry optimising for profit and not longevity. That's why SLC NAND has become almost extinct and priced beyond reason. I don't care how fast or large a storage device is if isn't reliable.
- wmf 3y agoI don't think longevity or flash has anything to do with it. Consumer devices of any type just can't afford reliable firmware.
- userbinator 3y agoSLC requires very little in the way of firmware, since the endurance is so high and BER so low that simple ECC and wear leveling is sufficient. TLC offers only 3x the capacity, but theoretically lasts 1/8th as long, as SLC NAND manufactured on an otherwise identical process; and the former also requires much more complex (hence more bug-prone) ECC and wear leveling algorithms too, which affects speed and power consumption. QLC is 4x the capacity for 1/16th the endurance. Industry marketing (and accompanying irrational pricing) has basically persuaded consumers to choose an inferior product.
- wmf 3y agoYou're never going to convince people to pay 2x-3x more than they have to.
- bigDinosaur 3y agoWhy not? There's certainly a group of consumers who will pay more for higher quality. I'm one of them. 2-3x current SSD costs for a better quality SSD would be completely fine with me. You're not paying more than you have to for the same product, you're purchasing a different product.
- wtallis 3y ago
- aftbit 3y agoRandom anecdote but I usually run Samsung (8X0 Pro) or Western Digital (Blue/Black) when I need cheap consumer NVMe drives. Otherwise I run used Intel enterprise SSDs with lots of life. Any component can fail but I have had good luck so far with these (fingers crossed). Of course, take frequent backups of any important storage.
- l8rlump 3y agoI've had issues with WD Blue recently. MacOS intermittently wouldn't boot on a 3-month-old drive. I wonder how much is shared between this product and the Sandisk, given that WD now own Sandisk? https://community.wd.com/t/wd-blue-250-gb-sa510-issues/279814/43 https://community.wd.com/t/wd-blue-250-gb-sa510-issues/27981... https://community.wd.com/t/wd-blue-sa510-sata-ssds-critical-firmware-update-available/281028 https://community.wd.com/t/wd-blue-sa510-sata-ssds-critical-...
- varenc 3y agoIf anyone wants a recommendation for an alternative, I've had a good experience with the Crucial X8 4TB external SSD. Not quite as fast as the SanDisk Extreme Pro but pretty decent. Wouldn't trust it 100% though. (Also after writing ~300GB continuously the write speed falls from ~900MB/s to 90MB/s). link: https://www.amazon.com/varencs-4tb-ssd-rec-ps-did-you-know-you-can-put-anything-here/dp/B0B787PNL7 https://www.amazon.com/varencs-4tb-ssd-rec-ps-did-you-know-y...
- inconceivable 3y agothis is more common than you may think at all levels of the industry. some failures get more publicity than others. all the hand wringing over vendor silicon reliability data and TRIM and RAID topology and i/o pattern optimization doesn't matter one bit when the firmware just decides to delete itself along with all the data for no reason at all. https://www.anandtech.com/show/15673/dell-hpe-updates-for-40k-hour-essd-failures https://www.anandtech.com/show/15673/dell-hpe-updates-for-40... this one was a real pain in the ass to deal with. always make testable backups, people. backups are not the same as redundancy. a 1, 2, 3, even 7 or 14 day recovery point is far better than poof it's gone.
- dboreham 3y agoSo the same thing that happened with every Raspberry Pi years ago?
- magicalhippo 3y agoOn a related note, I had a OCZ SSD back in the days which bricked itself all of a sudden. I was running nightly full-disk cloning of my disk via TrueImage, in addition to "realtime" backup of my user directory via Crashplan (back when they were good), so I was back up and running in less than 30 minutes with no important data loss. I know there are tools like Restic that can do what Crashplan did, but what's the TrueImage equivalent for Linux? Ie something I can use to clone my primary disk nightly in the background, including boot partition, incrementally with periodic full clones, and that supports resizing partitions (both up and down) in case the replacement disk isn't of equal size? I know of Clonezilla but from their front page it can't do incremental which is a showstopper. With TrueImage each incremental image takes only about 2-3GB per day on average, full is 500GB. It also seems to only support resizing up partitions which isn't great as it means I can't easily use old disks as emergency restore targets like I did when my OCZ died. I know ZFS root + send/receive is an option but as much as I like ZFS, I'm not comfortable running it on root yet.
- flyinghamster 3y agoI had a OCZ Vertex brick itself like that as well. Fortunately, it was a ZFS cache drive, so it was just a performance hit, but I never bought an OCZ product again.
- PenguinRevolver 3y agoCan this happen to 1TB models? Currently using one in the back of my computer 24/7.
- EricE 3y agoBackups are more than just a good idea!
- jkk22kk22kk 3y ago[flagged]