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WD refused to answer our questions about its self-wiping SanDisk SSDs
- cebert 3y agoHere is a master class on how not to handle public relations and how to erode your brand reputation.
- inversetelecine 3y agoThey don’t have much of one left as it is. It’s what happens with limited competition and no real repercussions from poor behavior that takes them in billions.
- gruez 3y ago>It’s what happens with limited competition What do you mean? The SSD space is pretty competitive. If you go on pcpartpicker.com and search for SSDs you see dozens of brands. Any company can slap together an SSD by soldering a controller and commodity flash together.
- Dalewyn 3y ago>Any company can slap together an SSD by soldering a controller and commodity flash together. That's kind of why I trust and prefer Samsung (yes, despite the firmware woes) and Micron (aka Crucial) for SSDs. Kioxia too, if we're talking enterprise. They're all in the business of making the actual NAND and maybe also the controller.
- bogwog 3y agoSo you trust the companies that have less competitors and outsized market power?
- mlyle 3y agoThey trust the companies that have ownership of key parts of the stack, rather than picking vendors for each piece and slapping them together. Such companies have a lot more internal expertise. Yes, it'd be nice to have more vendors like this, but you don't necessarily build a more robust industry just by having more vendors that buy NAND and a controller, make a few firmware tweaks for differentiation, and slap together a design based on an app note.
- hakfoo 3y agoThe presence of the second-tier manufacturers forces an interoperable world at the component level. If Samsung made flash that only worked with Samsung controllers and Samsung-exclusive PCB designs, they'd have a far smaller addressable market. I'm surprised we aren't seeing more flexibility out of the third-party market though. I could see someone saying "I'm willing to spend $100 for the most bestest possible 256Gb SSD for an industrial use case", and they'd sell you the parts that are normally sold as a 2TB MLC drive, but with a controller permalocked to using it all in psuedo-SLC cache mode, for example.
- mlyle 3y ago> The presence of the second-tier manufacturers forces an interoperable world at the component level. This is ignoring that there was a market for flash before we had NVME SSD controllers, and that there still is one. NVME is a big chunk of where flash goes now, but I don't think vertical integration is going to make flash disappear in the secondary market. In any case, -- yes, it's good to have a lot of manufacturers around for the industry. But it may not be as safe of a bet to buy from those other guys. There's enough gotchas in the design and support, and there's also the whole issue of supply chains and component quality.
- jasomill 3y agoTo Samsung's credit, they tend to fix firmware problems eventually. As such, by avoiding recently-released drives, I've had nothing but positive experiences with my fifteen or so Samsung drives, including several models that originally shipped with serious firmware bugs. While essentially obsolete at this point, I've also had excellent long-term experiences with (pre-WD) HGST SAS SSDs that use third-party (Intel) flash.
- robotnikman 3y agoSame, I can vouch for them as well. I still have one thats nearly a decade old and still being used fine.
- Tijdreiziger 3y agoKingston still seems to make their own flash and controllers too. They’ve been around for a long time (since the 80s, per Wikipedia) https://www.kingston.com/en/solutions/embedded-and-industrial https://www.kingston.com/en/solutions/embedded-and-industria...
- ciupicri 3y agoLet's not forget the Kingston V300 scandal [1]: > The first generation V300 (which was sampled to media) used Toshiba's 19nm Toggle-Mode 2.0 NAND but some time ago Kingston silently switched to Micron's 20nm asynchronous NAND. The difference between the two is that the Toggle-Mode 2.0 interface in the Toshiba NAND is good for up to 200MB/s, whereas the asynchronous interface is usually good for only ~50MB/s. The reason I say usually is that Kingston wasn't willing to go into details about the speed of the asynchronous NAND they use and the ONFI spec doesn't list maximum bandwidth for the single data rate (i.e. asynchronous) NAND. However, even though we lack the specifics of the asynchronous NAND, it's certain that we are dealing with slower NAND here and Kingston admitted that the Micron NAND isn't capable of the same performance as the older Toshiba NAND. [1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/7763/an-update-to-kingston-ssdnow-v300-a-switch-to-slower-micron-nand https://www.anandtech.com/show/7763/an-update-to-kingston-ss...
- gruez 3y ago
- ciupicri 3y agoHas Samsung replaced the SSDs with little life left because of their broken firmware?
- loeg 3y agoThe HDD space has fewer vendors (especially in the consumer space).
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- quectophoton 3y agoIt certainly seems that way. Earlier this year I was looking for internal 2.5" HDDs with more than 1TB of capacity, and I could only find Seagate drives. I try to always buy from different vendors, but in this case I had no choice but to buy 2 drives of the same model.
- Tijdreiziger 3y agoI just looked because I thought that can’t be right, and it seems like all three manufacturers (WD, Seagate and Toshiba) sell such drives https://tweakers.net/interne-harde-schijven/vergelijken/#filter:LY49DsIwDEbv4tlCdhLSpAdAYmDqiBhCayBSaKu2IATq3UkEk_X8Pf984DyFvtt3M9RHJkXI7DSysvaEIK82PTrpmtsw_gS7NZg1z6iMq7A0LHoyFitDGjUZhV47rMj6vCD2T5mWMt5IknaJQw_1JaRZEMZwlSa-BeotZZpiK4eY4wzzKO0upkWmfPUDTL6Ue0lBEdGGAOEeXgX_vCI4zUV7hpRfBXas4LSu6xc https://tweakers.net/interne-harde-schijven/vergelijken/#fil...
- quectophoton 3y agoHuh, okay I'm facepalming now. I have no excuse. I even used PCPartPicker for this PC build but for some reason it didn't occur to me to search for possible drives there to see what other stores could have them besides my usual stores (also I avoid Amazon for anything related to computers). Thank you for removing my tunnel vision.
- justsomehnguy 3y agoBe warned - all SATA drives there are SMR.
- linsomniac 3y agoI know WD used to be the darling, mostly of gamers it seemed. I never REALLY trusted them because the clients we had with the WD Black drives seemed to have more failures than my beloved Ultrastar or even Deskstar (I seemed to miss the Deathstar failures, I believe it was largely an issue of cooling). I sure was sad when I heard WD bought HGST. I had one of the Deathstar drives that I started getting I/O errors on, so I went to replace it. When I was taking it out of the system I realized it was quite hot to the touch. This was a mini tower system and I had two of the 5" bays open, so I closed them off with cardboard, left the original drive in the system and booted it back up, and it ran without errors for a couple three years after that.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago> I seemed to miss the Deathstar failures, I believe it was largely an issue of cooling The biggest trouble with WD drives (at least pre 2015) was quality of the power. If you had a good PSU you wouldn't had a problem with WD. If you had some shit like Thermaltake... I had a case when TT PSU consistently broke RAID10, because there were too much USB devices. Replaced with a proper PSU with the same rate and everything went fine.
- paulmd 3y agoWD cleaned up their act after the deathstar era and Seagate repeatedly shat the bed on HDD reliability (which continues to this day, backblaze had a bunch of seagate failures again). There’s literally only 3-4 players left, HGST was bought by WD, and then there’s Toshiba, so the choices aren’t very deep. I’ve had good results with Toshiba but they’re often more expensive, and volume is a lot lower than the other players. Samsung SSDs are another darling of the gaming community that has produced a parade of defective products over the last decade. Literally since the 830 series I think there has only been one or two models without a massive firmware defect or faulty flash.
- linsomniac 3y agoDeathstar was well before WD owned them I believe. I think that was post IBM, Hitachi or HGST. Isn't it funny that Backblaze finds Seagate fairly high in failures, but keeps going with them. But they are optimizing something different than I was. I was managing fairly small clusters, in the 10-150 node range. I considered it fairly expensive to have a drive failure, even if we used "remote hands" to replace the drive, we'd spend easy a couple hours on a drive failure between replacing, rebuilding, verifying, procurement and testing replacement drives. We ended up using mostly pairs of Deskstars between 2000 and 2010 when I was dealing with most of my mechanical drives. We have been using Samsung Pro and Evo 860 drives at my current job, probably have 40-50 of them, and have had good luck with them. But, I'm starting to wonder if we should rely on them based on the discussions here. We only really use them in dev and staging, production is largely Intel. I only recall one Samsung failure I've had, I had one as a ZFS log/cache drive for ~3 years and it started reporting errors.
- NelsonMinar 3y agoThis situation is particularly volatile because some very effective journalists have lost their work stored on Western Digital's broken drives.
- baby_souffle 3y agoAnybody else remember when they has small NAS devices with critical flaws that were actively being exploited and WD didn’t patch them because the devices were too old? Don’t buy anything but physical hdd from WD.
- inversetelecine 3y agoEven their physical hdds you have to be careful. I haven’t kept up with their SSDs but last I remember they are still competitive/good there.
- treprinum 3y agoMy x299 board refused to boot from a 2TB WD SSD drive with a single memory chip (forgot which color it was)... No issues with Crucial, Samsung nor Intel.
- twothamendment 3y agoMy parents still have one. I had to tell them how to unplug the Internet from their router so they could power it up and get their photos off. Who sells a product that at purchase time brags about it lasting a long time, but then when it needs support it is too old?
- justinclift 3y agoIntel does (or at least did) do this too, by not providing cpu microcode updates for some cpu models. "Only a small percentage of people use those..." Thus our "Not a single damn thing from Intel" policy for the last few years. FUCK that crowd. :( Never, ever again.
- jimmaswell 3y agoDoes AMD do better on that?
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- weinzierl 3y agoIs there a resource to identify the affected versions?
- alias_neo 3y agoI have one of these and have used it high yet, so looking forward to that. In other news, all of the WDRed CMR drives in my ZFS array started throwing read errors simultaneously so I've ripped them all out. I'm about done with WD.
- gruez 3y ago>In other news, all of the WDRed CMR drives in my ZFS array started throwing read errors simultaneously so I've ripped them all out. I don't get it, is the implication that them showing errors at time should be a freak occurrence, and such an occurrence means that WD drives are low quality? Drive failures are more correlated than you think. If you bought and installed the drives at the same time, such a failure case is totally expected. The drives probably came from the same batch, and experienced similar amount of wear, so it's only logical that they experienced the same failure case.
- b112 3y agoThese are spinning disks, not SSDs. Spinning disks are not known to fail like this, unless the manufacturer made a horrible mistake.
- gruez 3y agoOn the contrary. The same principle applies to them. Spinning disks might not have NAND cells that wear out, but they have other parts that have manufacturing defects and can experience wear: bearings, actuators, heads, etc. If you have 100 identical cars that rolled off the assembly line in sequence, you would their failure date to be be clustered, rather than being evenly distributed.
- nottorp 3y agoOn a tangent, wouldn't it make it safer if you didn't start a NAS with a bunch of identical drives, but you got them from different manufacturers and models? They'll still fail, but hopefully they'd be less likely to do it at the same time.
- veave 3y agoIt's possible that they keep selling them because the issue was silently fixed with a hardware or firmware revision. And of course they don't reply because they know anything they say will be used against them in a lawsuit. These days with the short attention spans of people it's more intelligent to do nothing but wait until things blow over.
- ImPostingOnHN 3y agoit seems more likely that they keep selling them because they like money, and never fixed it, and don't reply because they know that nobody can do anything about them not replying (their liability is a good point, too) since we have no evidence the issue was fixed, and since it seems to still be happening, we can safely assume it was not until such evidence arises
- Towaway69 3y agoDoes anyone have a link to affected drives? I've got two which have worked fine for the last three years but both are under 1TB. Does this only affect drives with more than 1tb?
- GlibMonkeyDeath 3y agohttps://support-en.wd.com/app/firmwareupdate https://support-en.wd.com/app/firmwareupdate
- Towaway69 3y agoThanks for that! I've got V1 and it seems to be a V2 issue... Phew!
- jeffh 3y agoHaving one of the possibly effected devices, I typed in my serial number and it claims to not be effected (has an updated firmware). There is no date on that web page about when the firmware was issue. Is this a case of the issue actually being fixed with the firmware update, so they can just blame those with data loss that they didn't keep up to date, or is this a problem even after?
- paul_funyun 3y agoGood on them. No good ever came of engaging with the Verge.
- px43 3y agoSeriously though, these questions from the Verge sound like a five year old demanding to know why they aren't allowed to eat ice cream in bed. Zero attempt at an actual investigation, just weirdly demanding to know from their PR people why computer stuff breaks sometimes. This is absolutely trash journalism.
- lynndotpy 3y agoI had one of these SanDisk SSDs and I lost terabytes of data within days of using it. Because of WesternDigital and SanDisk, I had an irreparable loss of art, notes, and photos spanning years of my life. (Yes, I know, keep three backups, etc.)
- px43 3y agoDid you send it to a data recovery company? It's usually trivial for them to recover data off drives that fail like this.
- denysvitali 3y agoBut also expensive right?
- tacker2000 3y agoWow, I didnt realize WD owns Sandisk. And i was always pretty satisfied with Sandisk tbh, and i also have this Extreme SSD, but this is making me reconsider somewhat…
- amelius 3y agoSo, what does HN consider to be good brands to buy these days, when it comes to SSDs? Sorry for bluntly asking.
- whitepoplar 3y agoSamsung Pro-series NVMe seems to be liked quite a bit.
- formerly_proven 3y agoRecently had a bad firmware version causing orders of magnitude increased NAND wear. Apparently took Puget Systems bugging Samsung about it to get a fix issued. Nobody’s perfect.
- ls612 3y agoThe best case scenario is that the product ships with perfectly bug free software. The second best case is that when a major bug is discovered it gets fixed quickly which Samsung did. IMO that’s a bigger measure of a company’s quality, how they react when something inevitably goes wrong.
- CamperBob2 3y agoPuget Systems' handling of that issue earned them a $10K order from me after the HN story appeared. Super impressed with the customer focus exhibited by them.
- SomeoneFromCA 3y agoThey have problems in Linux with autotrim, to the extent Ubuntu put trimming script into cron, if it detects Samsung SSD when installed.
- whitepoplar 3y agoWhat's the best NVMe drive for linux these days? (Seamless firmware updates, autotrim, rock-solid reliability)
- s3p 3y agoThis journalism is incredible. I love when reporters absolutely go in on these companies and expose them for their sloth. > Schultz repeatedly refused to answer any of our questions. Her statement doesn’t even contain an acknowledgment of the issue and has no specific timeline for any real answers. This kind of criticism was everywhere in the article and I absolutely love it. Hold their feet to the fire for making shitty products. WD deserves it.
- crazygringo 3y ago> And that’s just lawsuit number one: Ars Technica reports there are two more. Three SanDisk SSD lawsuits in total, each seeking class-action status for the same failures. Good. I don't really care about whether WD answers questions, I care about them losing a lawsuit and having punitive damages per affected customer that are far more than the retail value of each product, due to loss of data. I am baffled by why WD isn't voluntarily issuing product recalls, replacements, and/or firmware updates as necessary in this situation -- the hit they're taking to their reputation is far worse in the long run. But fortunately we have the courts.
- j-bos 3y agoI agree, I've naively trusted the SanDisk brand but just today I went compared and bought an SSD, didn't even look a WD or SanDisk. Their name is now tainted in my book.
- Tijdreiziger 3y agoInterestingly Framework (the laptop company) ships exclusively WD SSDs, although I suppose you can bring your own SSD if you really want. Though I wonder which other brands are trustable? Just yesterday I read a comment on another thread mentioning how Samsung’s firmware is subpar (which, having owned several other Samsung products, doesn’t surprise me).
- wtallis 3y agoThe solution is to give up on the entire idea of brand loyalty. These are commodity products. None of the products or companies are 100% reliable. To some extent, you get what you pay for, but paying more won't guarantee a trouble-free experience. When some brands command a premium price in the market, across their entire product line, that's really just a sign that they've managed to get customers to think their products are special. But everyone has shipped some lemons, and everyone has screwed over somebody with bad customer support.
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- _cenw 3y agoMy favorite story, of which I heard a few very similar sounding ones over the years, is the case of dead SanDisk SATA SSDs _sometimes_ timing out on all commands after booting up. So if you have one of those drives in your system and you have one of 3 common motherboard vendors, you'll sometimes just get a black screen. This seems to occur consistently when the computer was on in the last 30 minutes, leading most to assume bad motherboard or PSU. I replaced an entire aging system because I couldn't nail down the issue - and then it followed me into the new one because I falsely assumed a misbehaving drive wouldn't cause my BIOS to wait forever. This was the most frustrating year I've had with computers where I'd run my machine 24/7, just so I wouldn't have to deal with repeatedly trying to turn it on with 30 minute breaks in between.
- sdo72 3y agoI bought Sandisk SSDs & SD cards. All, literally ALL, of my Sandisk SSDs & SD cards either failed (no longer read) or have significantly degraded performance.
- greggyb 3y agoFor years, I have been convinced that the only reliable storage solution is an array of drives from different suppliers. My primary desktop runs ZFS with 4x10TB HDDs for bulk storage. These are in two mirrored pairs, so I have 20TB usable space. These consist of three different brands. The two same-branded drives are in different mirrors. When it is time to expand, I intend to swap new drives into the existing mirror, so that I will have mirrors with drives of different brands and ages.
- drexlspivey 3y ago> My primary desktop runs ZFS with 4x10TB HDDs for bulk storage. These are in two mirrored pairs, so I have 20TB usable space. You can have 30TB of usable space with SHR or RAID 5
- greggyb 3y agoI sure could, with 1. write performance equivalent to the slowest drive in that single vdev, rather than being striped across two vdevs 2. reads that cannot be distributed across the devices 3. riskier resilvers in the face of a failed drive 4. no ability to safely swap in new drives to existing vdevs as I described later in my post 5. less resilience to device failures There are always tradeoffs. I hope this illuminates some that I have considered.
- justsomehnguy 3y agoGo with LVM parity volumes. 1. For sequential it's up to 3x with full stripe writes, up to 3x in random. 2. Reads in a mirror can't be 'distributed' for the sequential access anyway - repositioning would eat all benefits, it's always faster to read further than to seek and read. 3. For 4 drives it's negligible 4. You can even swap in smaller drives, if your total dataset would fit, no hard limit 5. Exactly the same And you are free to use the free space as JBOD, mirror, mirrored mirror or stripe.
- greggyb 3y ago
- gumby 3y agoI see I have one of these devices as a local backup device. Any recommendations for a more reliable alternative? Somehow I don't think Backblaze's statistics are going to help much :-)
- xbar 3y agoThere are only 4 names I need to remember for the remainder of my career to be satisfied with my SSD needs: David Goeckler (CEO) Michael C. Ray (GC) Robin Schulz Samsung
- tibbydudeza 3y agoI don't think it is as easy as a firmware fix - seems the problem is on the SSD controller level.
- Arech 3y agoThat's freaking sad to see such idiocy from the company to which I trusted so much((( I have several their very old (couple of 500Gb and one 1Tb) HDDs that's in daily use all these 15+ years...but it looks like I wouldn't buy from them anything new.
- jgb1984 3y agoAnecdotal: I've been into pc's for 30 years. Each failed harddisk I had over those 3 decades was announced in advance by increased sounds, lowered performance and SMART warnings. In all cases I was either capable of retrieving all the data before the thing died, or at least managed to recover most of it. With SSD's, the failure was always sudden, zero warning, and resulted in 100% data loss. My most important files live on traditional spinning hard disks and will continue to do so (and backups, of course). Knock on wood.