Anyone else have a similar experience with one of these drives?
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?
Lemmy definitely showing the same symptoms as Reddit as it grows. Too many people trying to show off how technically smart they are and just come off as obnoxious dweebs
I don’t know why people think that this behavior would ever be restricted to Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.?
There’s one common element in all these systems…
Just remove the humans and the problem disappears
I’ve seen enough AI freak outs to know that’s not true.
My new preferred social media is just me talking to ChatGPT
And who do you think trained him? Data from the same people you dislike.
It’s becoming more and more noticeable and it’s making me sad.
The thing is, there’s nothing wrong with sharing knowledge or pointing out best practices. What sucks is people replying JUST to point out the flaws and then gloat, without even fully comprehending what happened in the article. But this behavior has been around way longer than reddit.
I feel it’s the same kind of people who complain regarding the same questions popping up at a forum often. I don’t get why they can’t just ignore them? Sure you could maybe find the answer by googling but sometimes you want to interact with others. Plus you might learn things you didn’t know you should also have asked.
My feeling is that Stackexchange is the place that has taken this the furthest with the result that new people can neither ask any questions nor get any points to get more rights on the site.
Yes, More opinions always lead to better decisions
It think it has always been there, it’s part of the internet and tech culture. Lemmy is not going to magically change that. We can try to make it better by writing good contributions and supporting those who do.
Downvote those dweebs
Lemmy guess… this is your 2nd go with a social media platform?
Lemmy sit you down on my knee son and let grandpa here explain how social media worked in his old times of facebook just like I sat on my grandpappys knee and he explained to me the days of AIM.
/s
Lemmy stop you right there—
And what’s most important is you putting smart people down to make yourself feel superior to them
This is one the best uses of irony (probably unintentional or trolling) I’ve ever seen. Thanks
They sure are, bro. They sure are
You’ve been putting people down everywhere, quite hypocritical of you
How else are they supposed to show off how much smarter they are than those grubby redditors?
What, you don’t do RAID-6 and carry around 5 external USB drives to move your data between locations? It’s just so convenient. 🤣
Seriously, I don’t get the raid comments at all.
Of course I don’t carry 5 external drives with me all the time, that would be ridiculous.
I carry the whole HBA.
Every1s doing it
Lol this place is half a circle jerk of people who think they’re certified geniuses for rejecting mainstream technology, tech hipsters. There was a thread about Google’s “safe browsing” thing and most of the comments were just "iMaGiNe UsInG gOoGle!!*
My only counter argument is that the verge article should also have stuck to the failures/defect, and either not mentioned their own dataloss, or at least mention possible mitigation strategies. I understand not everyone can do proper backups, but the verge can, and they should lead by example.
As for a comment on the actual drive defect, this is probably one of those cases where you want to insist on a refund. If the problem is as widespread as claimed, then getting a new defective drive doesn’t really help. WD/sandisk should just be recalling and refunding all devices. It’s odd that tech stuff never seems to have recalls in the same way that cars do? They seem to just rely on individual RMAs.
Aren’t usually recalls mostly for cases where it would cause personal injuries and as such the damages to the company are far bigger than not doing the recall.
Yeah it’s probably a risk/damages calculation. But imagine if WD had simply recalled all affected devices. Might mitigate some of the PR damage?
Why is your comment with so many upvotes but I still had to scroll down to find it. Everything above is kinda morbid. Im glad I scrolled enough, was worried a bit 🤣
Thank you for saying this
Did you read the article? Because as far as I can see it fails to actually say shit about the problem. From just this article I can see why people are blaming the author for not having redundancy.
The Arstechnica articles however do actually say what’s going on, so yeah this appears to be a real issue with these drives disconnecting.
Yes.
But never miss an opportunity to pleasure yourself in public I guess?
I mean I wasn’t really in the mood but I’ll rub one out just for you
Then the article title should be less click bait termed and properly address that there’s a major firmware fault in the drives.
Journalism is lost on generating clicks and user turmoil rather than servicing the public in any way.
The article does exactly that.
Or read the article instead of just the headline.
I read the article, it’s also shit and fails to properly talk about the issue instead of ranting about data loss.
Or maybe people should actually read articles first instead of commenting based off just reading the “click bait“ headline?
are we not allowed to comment on the meta of the article as well as the substance of the article? i guess we need to stop complaining about paywalls and excessive inline ads too then
Yeah, because that’s exactly what I said, clearly. 🙄
This is exactly why I invested 250x the cost of one SSD into my raid setup. It’s 100 SSD’s in raid1 in a huge rack which slides vertically on 4 guide poles.
I sit under the contraption and lean forward as far as I can, before lowering it onto my back. This method allows me to suck my own cock with ease, so that I don’t need to fellate myself on public forums
so that I don’t need to fellate myself on public forums
But you still do anyway, because you like the way it feels
But he doesn’t HAVE TO
No. He doesn’t NEED to.
Big difference. He can. And he probably also has to, but he just doesn’t NEED to.
I hope you’re getting off on redundancy and not a backup. Because RAID.is.not.a.backup.
(I can even gargle my balls)
Raid doesnt even protect against bit rot either. It doesn’t matter how many disks you write to even in a raid one array you are still vulnerable. Unless you have a high end raid card that does block level checksuming your raid array will not go back and verify previously written to data is still correct. If it does have checksuming it still isn’t smart enough to know which drive is the is correct and will lock the array in the best case.
ZFS pools do checksumming, snapshotting, etc.
As well as BTRFS and ReFS
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!
Good bot.
redundancy is key
redundancy is key
redundancy is key
Even more redundancy
LOL
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.
Can’t trust Amazon with shit nowadays. What’s the point of sales if you get fake shit in the first place? I mean, Amazon is sleazy even without the common-binning but for a while they were good with their online shopping.
Also, what data storage solutions do you use now? I’m considering just encrypting my stuff and uploading them to some paid cloud service - atleast then someone else smarter than me is responsible for making sure it’s safe and accessible.
I encrypt anything important and use Google for offsite cloud because I, luckily, only have text and a few gigabytes of images that I want the extra step of encryption for.
Everything else, media and such that’s hard to replace but not important gets put on a drive and swapped out monthly to my sister’s house, and my best friend’s house.
Here, there’s a drive on each PC with that stuff, plus whatever is on the individual PC that gets moved to those drives. I’d have to go look for which is where though. But that’s five copies that I update from my main PC as I get new stuff, so they get moved around a good bit. And there’s a backup that is held as a spare.
But, all my files for the stuff I write are also synced to Dropbox and gdrive hourly when I’m writing, and again at the end of a session. During each session, its autosaved every five minutes because I’m a tad lazy and don’t like rewriting things I just wrote because there’s a power issue out here in the boonies. UPS might be an option, but I don’t always write on the same thing.
I don’t like Google any more, and don’t trust any of the “cloud” services as far as I can spit, but they are stable. I’ve never lost anything from the major services, and the free tiers are enough for my needs of important stuff.
I was today years old when I learned places like TheVerge are filled with idiots who keep work on USB media, keep no backups, and act like it’s not their fault when something fails.
Places like The Verge used to be staffed by actual enthusiasts because they were created by enthusiasts. Now they have been sold off to another conglomerate (Vox Media) whose primary goal is to maximize profit. That means getting rid of the competent journalists and hiring ignorant gen z morons who never accept responsibility for anything. Every single problem in their life is someone else’s fault.
They also think it’s newsworthy when they experience one hardware failure. How nice to have a platform to shout your own personal grievances from.
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.
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
My external SSD I put together with a “nice” enclosure started dropping to 5MB/s on any machine. I don’t trust most external SSDs anymore.
I DO trust my RPi case with built-in m.2 USB adapter thingy, as it’s running full speed in that thing, no issues with speed dropping.
I’d like to know more about this adapter thingy.
Oh it’s AMAZING. It’s an expensive case for the Raspberry Pi 4 models, called Argon. It’s 45USD or so. BUT! It CHANGES THE SHITTY MICRO HDMI PORTS INTO TWO REAL HDMI PORTS!
It also has a little slot for an m.2 SSD inside it, and a tiny USB connector to make it work with a Pi. You can super easily boot from SSD and use a microsd as extra storage. It’s like 10x faster than microSD, it’s wild.
I had bought a different case (that honestly I love) but when I read about this one, I fell in love. Only problem is it only takes SATA m.2 drives, which happened to be the kind in my shitty enclosure.
I did something similar and use these UGreen enclosures with an M.2 on each RPi in my cluster. You can easily use these as portable media with whatever SSD you want.
Sorry, on mobile and have no idea how to strip the Amazon link properly. This is the older model I got.
You can buy straight from them as well. Never had an issue with any of their products. https://www.ugreen.com/collections/hubs-docks/products/ugreen-m-2-nvme-sata-ssd-enclosure-reader?variant=39915665129534
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…
Ok, that’s far too much.
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/
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.
“I trusted all my important data to a single point of failure and now I’m screwed”.
So, yes, I respect that SanDisk’s drive may have a manufacturing defect and that sucks but they have to share the blame for this. Seriously, drive mirroring is a thing and every single OS supports it out of the box. A proper RAID system is a thing and even better. Adding duplicate storage, be it cloud, another NAS or backing up to tape is even better still. It’s the 21st century, you should know that by now if your literal job is based on storing data.
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.
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)
What is the advantage of using this over an USB to SATA adapter?
It’s extremely hard to make, but I was hoping there’s a review website with 100% real user review so this kind of issue can be discovered more easily
reviewmeta tries to do this with Amazon reviews
BRB setting up sync for my OS drive!
