Lawsuit takes Western Digital to task over SanDisk SSDs allegedly erasing data
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Western Digital knows there is an unreasonably high failure rate for these drives, and they even offered a firmware update that was supposed to fix the problem. But drives continue to fail. And Western Digital continues to sell them.
Remember: When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
Remember: When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
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Well, doesn't that just bring back memories (of reporting on Western Digital stories)...
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I saw headlines about these drives not long after buying one in December 2022 (past the return window sadly). Just yesterday, suddenly all the data is gone. I'm glad I had nothing important on there but I guess it was a when, not if, the drive was going to fail. I found a firmware update but truly it's been a colossal waste of money as no firmware fix will make me trust it.
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It would be good to see some statistics on the failure rate of these devices vs the overall market - hopefully that will come from discovery. I've been sticking to traditional HDDs for backup/archival purposes just to diversify my risk across the two technologies, but I don't have data to back that practice up.
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Doing a wedding shoot and having one of these die on you would give "fucked" a whole new meaning.
They deserve whats coming to them via the legal system.
They deserve whats coming to them via the legal system.
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Not simping for WD here, and it's tangental to the SSD problem but since it's referenced at the end of the article I'll consider it fair game - the whole drive size terminology fiasco is stupid. ALL HDD manufacturers I've ever dealt with use the same terms - megabyte, gigabyte, and terabyte - and use them properly. Just because most normal humans don't understand what a TB is vs. a TiB doesn't mean WD (or Seagate, or any other manufacturer over the years) was misleading people.
/rant
/rant
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Ideally any professional photographer should be dumping their photos as they take them to two separate external drives from two separate manufacturers.
Any drive can have problems...these are just a lot more likely to have problems than most.
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I had an Extreme Pro 2TB drive (latest edition). Never had any issues and then the firmware update came out. So I bought a second identical unit (the price on Amazon was great) thinking they were fixed.
Now I’m pissed to realize that even firmware updated drives can fail. Now I’m stuck with two drives that I can’t trust.
Now I’m pissed to realize that even firmware updated drives can fail. Now I’m stuck with two drives that I can’t trust.
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As the linked article by Jeremy Reimer points out the "proper" definition was very much up for debate then. Since that time the matter has been settled with a definition which happened to favour storage manufacturers' view, but that doesn't erase the history of controversy.
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What a ridiculous idea! Who would ever want a redundant array of independent disks?
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This comment finally made me see the light. Honestly, I've known about the difference for so long, I stopped caring about it. But if you'd asked me yesterday, I would have said that the HD makers were gaming the system. Not now.
Now I understand who really deserves the blame for this confusion about disk capacity: RAM vendors. Those bastards have used incorrect units for decades, giving their customers more bytes than they expected, and all for free.
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It's called a mirrored RAID1 array — and been around for a few decades.
It's not considered good enough because of more single points of failure: If the connection interface or the OS copy operation had a glitch, both drives would record the corrupted data identically. Also, typically, simple RAID1 arrays don't check the data upon read; they just protect against a whole-disk failure. Also, if you accidentally delete data off a drive, it's gone from both.
For those reasons, the industry standard in video/film/TV is 2 separate drives (minimum), and verify the copy independently on each.
This WD snafu does make a case for taking care to use 2 different-brand drives. You want to trust that the chance of a systemic failure causing both to fail within days would be extremely low… not so anymore.
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The IEC standard was tabled in the beginning of 1999. The linked article is in 2006. Granted, things like class action lawsuits take their time winding through the legal system, but by the time that article was written, there wasn't a whole lot of controversy.
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I know, right? No one else believes me when I tell them about the secret RAM conspiracy.
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You have to be very, very careful about what you wish for. What you said already exists. One popular form of it is the WD MyBook Duo hard drive. It follows the established method of increasing capacity beyond commonly available sizes, by...taking two hard drives, sticking them in the same case, and bonding them with RAID so that they appear to the user as a single really big hard drive, or as a RAID mirror so that one drive constantly syncs with the other.
Your wish is granted, right? And it's awesome, because RAID?
Not necessarily. The RAID is typically managed by a hardware controller in the case. Things can fail in the case, like one of the drives, or the controller. If a drive fails, you can't just put in another drive, because it might have proprietary WD encryption. If the controller fails, the drives could become junk metal because the RAID controller is WD proprietary, so you may have trouble reading the data with common tools.
So your solution already exists, and it is widely known to have serious problems and risks...maybe because the WD MyBook Duo is by THE SAME Western Digital that is the focus of this article!
Sample reading:
WD My Book Duo Raid Faux Failure
WD My Book Duo data forever lost if Drive Enclosure Dies!
MY Book Duo - Hardware Encryption
If you want that solution, it might be better to build your own. I am watching what is happening in the NVMe space, because we're starting to see simple, affordable dual-slot NVMe enclosures. With those, you put in two fast NVMe SSDs of any available capacity, and you can apply your own RAID or sync solution if you want, something you have control over. And even a dual NVMe enclosure is much tinier and more portable than any of these WD solutions, and maybe even bus-powered.
About the wedding example: What many, many wedding and commercial photographers require is one of the pro digital camera bodies with dual card slots. When you take a photo, the camera can be set to write the same image to both cards independently. So you don't need a dual hard drive because you already have two identical cards from the job, which if stored separately, provide redundancy until the first computer backups are made after the photos are transferred to the computer. After at least two non-card backups exist of the photos, the cards are then free to be put back into the camera and reformatted for the next wedding.
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At some point, and after a few years of courtroom wrangling, that’ll undoubtedly be $100,000,000.00 for the law firm that filed the suit, and a generous $7.46 for each customer who bought one of those defective PoSs.
There really ought to be some kind of lower limit each member of such a class must be paid before such a lawsuit can be settled… i.e. at least 33% of whatever price a consumer paid for each affected product.
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I mean... have we met? Doesn't much matter whose drives they were stored on, because the array is redundant, fully backed up, and 24/7 automatically monitored.
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I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you've never professionally sold computing devices to end users.
Because let me tell you, end users get extremely confused about that, and extremely angry about it when their invoice says they got a "2TB" drive, but their operating system tells them it's only a "1.8TB" drive. I have spent probably a literal 24/7 week of my lifespan explaining those issues to very, very angry people certain that not only were they getting screwed, but that I was the one screwing them.
And if you think "a literal 24/7 week" sounds like it's dramatically overstated, well, I've been having to have those explanation/arguments with people since it was "they bought a 120GB drive, but their OS says it's only 111GB."
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With a tag like ‘extreme’ I guess one has to wonder. Push the edge of the envelope and sometimes it just can’t be delivered.
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Pretty sure the reason we have two separate sets of units in the first place is because the storage vendors dug their heels in on the short changing practice and we still needed binary aligned units elsewhere. Though, admittedly, I could be misinformed.
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poke 532810
Ars Praetorian
The fix is obviously to add a mandatory arbitration clause to their end-user license agreement.
/s
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This demonstrates an interesting point about the reliability, and ability to recover from failure, of the two leading storage types: flash and spinning disks.
With spinning disks, the data for many (probably most) of the drives is almost perfectly fine on the platters-- perhaps minus some corrupt bits as the drive failed. If the data is important enough, you can send the drive to a recovery service which could mount the drive platters in a special rig (or replace with electronics with functional ones) and read the data.
Flash isn't so easily recovered, given both the physics of flash memory and the way storage is implemented electronically.
While properly implemented flash storage is extremely reliable-- and better able to withstand physical abuse than spinning disk-- it may be worthwhile to consider disk for extremely important data. Also, as with any storage solution, make regular backups. Backups won't help if the data lost was created between backup sessions, of course, but it's better than only having the one copy.
With spinning disks, the data for many (probably most) of the drives is almost perfectly fine on the platters-- perhaps minus some corrupt bits as the drive failed. If the data is important enough, you can send the drive to a recovery service which could mount the drive platters in a special rig (or replace with electronics with functional ones) and read the data.
Flash isn't so easily recovered, given both the physics of flash memory and the way storage is implemented electronically.
While properly implemented flash storage is extremely reliable-- and better able to withstand physical abuse than spinning disk-- it may be worthwhile to consider disk for extremely important data. Also, as with any storage solution, make regular backups. Backups won't help if the data lost was created between backup sessions, of course, but it's better than only having the one copy.
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Unfortunately, that's the take away Western Digital is going to get from this.
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Not sure any of their portable drives from the last 4-5 years are reliable. My Passport Ultra 2TB (ordered directly from WD) just started clicking/chirping (probably about to die, but still readable for now). SMART says it was powered on about 40 times and used for only 30 hours, but it's techincally a few years old and out of warranty, of course. Done with WD. Moving to Samsung SSDs (just bought a T7 Shield 2TB to replace Passport), maybe Seagate HDDs for larger capacity.
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Besides the point with regards to the WD shenanigans: If you're doing a wedding shoot and you are not using a camera capable of writing to two SD/CF/XQD cards simultaneously, you deserve whatever wrath you get from your customers. Damn near every modern professional mirrorless system offers this capability and if you're shooting events, you cant afford not to.
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You are not misinformed.
There are two sets of people to blame: the engineers who originally, sloppily, used scientific notation prefixes for groups of 1,024 instead of 1000, and the goddamn marketers who seized on the error and very deliberately used it to mislead consumers. I know which group I dislike more, mind you, but both groups share the blame--because it's not like marketers either didn't exist or weren't marketers before that happened, the damn engineers should've known better.
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In totally unrelated news, Newegg has the SanDisk 2TB Extreme Portable and SanDisk 4TB Extreme Portable SSDs on sale for LESS THAN HALF PRICE!
https://www.newegg.com/sandisk-extr...s-_-N82E16820173504&ignorebbr=1&cvtc=19237559
https://www.newegg.com/sandisk-extr...s-_-N82E16820173505&ignorebbr=1&cvtc=19237559
Would be nice if my data meant nothing to me.
https://www.newegg.com/sandisk-extr...s-_-N82E16820173504&ignorebbr=1&cvtc=19237559
https://www.newegg.com/sandisk-extr...s-_-N82E16820173505&ignorebbr=1&cvtc=19237559
Would be nice if my data meant nothing to me.
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Depends what you call selling, and who you call and end user. I do solution design for IT departments. My customers (nearly all, at least) know the actual capacity they are getting, so this isn't normally a conversation I need to have. That said, I built a spreadsheet that I've used for years that allows me to take exactly the hard drive capacity and RPM they are buying, the RAID level they are using, and give them a realistic expectation of actual usable capacity and IOPS, inclusive of the TB to TiB conversion.
That thing used to be more important up to about 5 years ago, and these days every now and then when someone insists on putting their own hard drives in a Synology or similar. Now, most enterprise storage arrays I deal with are all-flash dedup-based black magic boxes where your mileage will vary based on much weirder math around what kind of data you have. If you ever want to see the management GUI of a Dell PowerStore, let me know.
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Purely Microsoft's fault for misusing kB shorthand when they meant KiB. Here is a good article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
It's situations like this which make some engineers so anal.
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If it's a Mac, tell them it's the "Apple tax" (ducks and hides).
Now seriously, just checked on my Mac. Selected a hard drive in the Finder, Cmd-I = Info, it says 2TB, and then it says an exact number of bytes used, say 123,456,789,012 bytes and in brackets (123.456 GB).
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Are you seriously floating the idea that "solution design for IT departments" is the same thing as "selling computing devices to end users?"
Yes, pretty much everybody in any given IT department is aware that they shouldn't expect to see 1TB capacity out of a "1TB" drive... although quite a lot of them probably don't know why (I find that many assume it's all "system overhead" that simply isn't reported as part of the capacity), they're at least aware that they shouldn't expect the numbers to match up.
End users, on the other hand...
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If it's a Mac, they'll get (last time I checked) an answer in GB/TB in Finder, but an answer in GiB/TiB in most (but not all!) Terminal applications.
This is really not a problem you can un-fuck from the OS side of things, because ultimately the sectors themselves are power-of-two collections of bytes, which means the drive itself will have a total number of bytes that also divides evenly by powers-of-two. That's ignoreable at the very shallowest end of the curve, but at some point, you have to get back to reality as you move further down the stack.
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No not at all ... my point was that end user compute is not what I do. Mostly. Sometimes it comes up. But the math is still important when I do some low-level design.
On the other hand, I have had that conversation with all my family. All of them. Multiple times.
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