SanDisk’s silence deafens as high-profile users say Extreme SSDs still broken

SanDisk's silence this week has been deafening. Its portable SSDs are being lambasted as users and tech publications call for them to be pulled. The recent scrutiny of the drives follows problems from this spring when users, including an Ars Technica staff member, saw Extreme-series portable SSDs wipe data and become unmountable. A firmware update was supposed to fix things, but new complaints dispute its effectiveness. SanDisk has stayed mum on recent complaints and hasn't explained what caused the problems.

In May, Ars Technica reported on SanDisk Extreme V2 and Extreme Pro V2 SSDs wiping data before often becoming unreadable to the user's system. At least four months of complaints had piled up by then, including on SanDisk's forums and all over Reddit (examples one, two, and three).

Even Ars' Lee Hutchinson fell victim to the faulty drives. Two whole Extreme Pros died on him. Both times they filled about 50 percent and then showed a bunch of read and write errors. Upon disconnecting and reconnecting, the drive was unformatted and wiped, and he could not fix either drive by wiping and reformatting.

When Ars reached out to SanDisk about the problem in May, it didn't answer most of our questions about why these problems happened (and, oddly, excluded certain models we saw affected when naming which models were affected). Parent company Western Digital released a firmware update at the end of May, though, and named these affected drives as supposedly fixed via the update:

• SanDisk Extreme Portable 4TB (SDSSDE61-4T00)
• SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable 4TB (SDSSDE81-4T00)
• SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable 2TB (SDSSDE81-2T00)
• SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable 1TB (SDSSDE81-1T00)
• Western Digital My Passport 4TB (WDBAGF0040BGY)

"We addressed this firmware issue in the manufacturing process, and we can confirm that the issue is not impacting currently shipping products," Western Digital's firmware update page says.

Despite that affirmation, The Verge's supervising producer is having a very bad week, and the site's blaming it on SanDisk.

SanDisk SSD troubles continue

On Monday, The Verge reported that the replacement portable SSD SanDisk sent supervising producer Vjeran Pavic after his 4TB Extreme Pro Portable inadvertently wiped 4TB of video. The drive was supposed to include the firmware fix, but The Verge reportedly still "lost 3TB of video we’d shot for The Verge because the drive is no longer readable." It shared a screenshot saying, "The disk you attached was not readable by this computer."

Additionally, people on social media claim their Extreme portable SSDs aren't working either.

For example, Natural-Opposite-633 on Reddit posted on July 26 that they updated their 4TB Extreme SSD's firmware, but then....

... about a week after that, I was transferring some files from my Android device to it, and it did the same thing, unmounted and would no longer mount unless you formatted it. The data could be recovered with Diskdrill, but with generic serialized names. ... I have 4 of these drives in total, one 4TB and one 2TB that are not flagged as being affected and have been pretty solid. One new 4TB that was flagged as being affected and [had] data loss twice as described above, and one new 4TB I got through an Amazon sale that I'm regretting buying.

Additional instances are less clear about whether or not they deployed SanDisk's firmware update before experiencing problems. However, people continue to struggle with and distrust these portable SSDs.

A user known as Shopping_Particular posted on Reddit three days ago that their 4TB Extreme SSD became unreadable to its Mac.

"After shooting for a couple days I went to back up the data and my computer can't read it/it won't mount," they wrote.

Another Reddit user, Psychological_Bee687, posted last month that their 1TB SanDisk drive dismounted from their MacBook Pro before refusing to mount.

"I tried to get it to mount—or even show up in Disk Utility—on my old [MacBook Pro] 2015 but no luck. After trying everything I know, and a few things I didn’t, I can’t get it to even mount or be seen by Disk Utility," they wrote.

There is at least one example of the firmware update working. Is that why SanDisk isn't addressing customers' remaining concerns, even after a popular publication like The Verge calls them out based on first-hand experience?

The Verge isn't the only tech publication "furious" with SanDisk. On Tuesday, PetaPixel aired its grievances, starting with a damning headline: "SanDisk Portable SSDs Are Failing So Frequently, We Can No Longer Recommend Them."

The photography blog said its staff members experienced problems with the Extreme series of SSDs and SanDisk's Pro-G40 portable SSD. Now, various PetaPixel staff members have ceased using SanDisk portable SSDs entirely.

The publication wrote:

The issues with the newer Pro-G40 started occurring not even a month after receipt and was causing DaVinci Resolve to crash repeatedly. Thinking it might have been an issue with his particular computer or install, he switched to an entirely separate machine. This did not fix the issue and even caused the entire computer to crash. Once he unplugged the Pro-G40, however, the issue stopped, pretty clearly highlighting the SSD as the cause of the problem.

So what exactly is going on with SanDisk's Extreme line of SSDs? Was the firmware fix insufficient? Are users at risk of drives wiping their data, and is Western Digital's My Passport (which SanDisk said was affected by problems in May) susceptible to failing users too? What about the Pro-G40? Was PetaPixel's experience an anomaly? Should users consider blacklisting SanDisk SSDs as some PetaPixel staffers have?

Where's SanDisk?

I'd love to give you more insight into what's happening with SanDisk SSDs. But PR representatives for SanDisk and Western Digital haven't responded to my requests for comment. The company doesn't appear to have answered The Verge or PetaPixel either.

To be fair, Ars, The Verge, and PetaPixel only reached out about recent alleged SSD problems this week. But it took at least four months and inquiries from Ars before SanDisk released a firmware fix (which may or may not have totally worked) for the initial SSD problems. SanDisk's delayed response didn't explain what caused the problem or what it'll do to ensure something like this doesn't occur again. And SanDisk's firmware update page fails to prove SanDisk is taking the threat of customer data loss seriously, as it merely states that the affected products can "unexpectedly disconnect from a computer."

Now, the company's been mum on claims that its firmware fix was a bust, and people and publications (The Verge said it asked Western Digital why the drives are still on sale) are calling for the products to stop being sold and marketed.

Ars hasn't experienced the issue post-firmware update ourselves (Lee returned his), but the abrupt failure of Lee's two drives combined with half-hearted responses from the company means I won't be picking up one of its storage devices anytime soon, if ever.

Already on thin ice

Western Digital/SanDisk's reputation was already in tatters, and the company had been blacklisted by many technologists due to it seemingly failing to prioritize customers.

In June, Ars reported about Western Digital automatically flagging NAS drives with a warning label in Synology DiskStation Manager once they passed three years of use. In April, Western Digital enraged customers after a My Cloud network breach blocked data access. Western Digital paid $2.7 million in a class-action lawsuit for SMR-gate, Law Street Media said in 2021. Some will also recall a class-action lawsuit that alleged Western Digital misrepresented drive sizes, and the company settled matters with free software.

That checkered past gives Western Digital and its brands virtually zero wiggle room regarding consumer complaints. And as a storage company, you'd think Western Digital/SanDisk would respond to repeated claims of lost data seriously, quickly, and honestly. Faulty products and bugs happen sometimes. You can tell a lot about how much a company cares and will work to avoid repeated problems by the quality of the explanation and remediation resources (The Verge, for example, suggested free recovery services) it offers customers.

When it comes to minimizing the risk of lost data, the 3-2-1 backup rule always applies. But another rule should also be to avoid companies that don't properly react to customer concerns about disappearing data and defective products.