“We just lost 3TB of data on a SanDisk Extreme SSD” - The Verge

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 didn't believe you but yeeeeeesh. Lots of self righteous penises ITT. If people buy an expensive hard drive, it should work. Not everyone knows everything there is to know about data storage, have a little grace people

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.

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.

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 🤣

Showing off my superior intellect is always relevant!

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.

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

irrelevant to the point of the article

What are you talking about? Of course it's relevant.

Hard drives are unreliable, they always have been and they probably always will be.

I've personally had three drives fail in the last 12 months - two HDDs and one SSD. And both of those were internal hard drives either in a data center or at least on a desk in a properly climate controlled office. All three of them were from far more reputable manufacturers than WD. I suspect none of those failures were the actual disk by the way pretty sure they were all chipset or firmware failures.

Your solution doesn't have to be RAID, but it has to be something better than "I'll just keep this file on a single drive".

WD should absolutely do better - but at the same time even if they did do better it still wouldn't be good enough. There shouldn't be any data loss when (not if) a drive fails.

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.

so that I don't need to fellate myself on public forums

But you still do anyway, because you like the way it feels

I hope you're getting off on redundancy and not a backup. Because RAID.is.not.a.backup.

Good bot.

redundancy is key

I wonder if it'd be worth returning if you're still in the window. I don't know how common the issues are though. Maybe check out the Ars Technica article someone linked?

I almost bought one because they were on huge sale at Amazon.

You're probably fine, all drives have failures and I haven't seen anything to indicate this is a widespread issue with the drive.

I used to think this, but now, less so.

I agree with you in general, as most people don't use physical media. However, those of us that do, are probably pretty secure in our legacy.

I have digital files that have been with me for over a quarter of a century, first through repeated copies to new media formats, then to more sophisticated backup systems. In the past few years, I've been alternating backing up to cloud services and then to local USB disks; the backup program is a statically compiled, monolithic program with few dependencies. Recently, I found a solution to the encrypted restore by survivors. I even have a README with instructions.

I'm secure in the knowledge that my 3TB of painstakingly curated collection of foot porn will be available to future researchers, for the betterment of mankind.

I’ve been telling people for years that the entire 21st century is at risk of being a lost century. Even personally I can’t guarantee my data will be with me 20 years from now even though I back it up. If you care about a photo or document, print it and throw it it a box. As I get older I find more of an obsession with physical media from a preservation point of view. Because I know my books and pictures will be around 50 years from now. Digital files not so much.

LOCKSS and KISS, though. Flash chips don't last forever but are pretty durable, and so are optical media as long as they're the right material. SSDs decay and HDDs fail, but for magnetic platter media even if the head or motor crashes there's always the old magnetic microscope in a pinch. USB's not going anywhere, and if you have four or five copies that you don't completely neglect and don't store in the same physical place, presumably you'll have the chance to notice and take corrective measures if any of them start failing or are at risk.

I don't actually know that an individual book or picture will still be around in 50 years; Fire, flooding, insects, acidic paper, low-quality ink maybe— Digital stuff's fragile, but so is physical stuff. Stick it in the attic, and the heat'll speed up any chemical reactions and probably make it cozier for insects; Stick it in the basement, and the condensation will get you mildew and rot. By contrast, having a flash drive accidentally survive a trip through a washer and dryer is a pretty common occurrence, and I've yet to lose a drive even with that level of negligence. Material compatibility's one of the very most basic parts of a set of very precise manufacturing techniques, tin whiskers seem pretty rare these days, the really scarily insidious stuff like hydrogen embrittlement is super improbable, and most biological forms of decay haven't adapted to eating cured epoxy and monocrystalline silicon yet.

At least I sorta know how a flash cell or hard drive platter is meant to be structured; Who knows what weird organic reactions and unstable or slowly diffusing molecules are happening in the pile of chemical pigments on a sheet of likely-acidic bleached cellulose and cheap ink or toner, and whether it will still be legible to human eyes in however many years? Plus, a printed photo or document starts fading the very instant it's created, and it gets a little worse every time you touch it with sweaty human hands or look at it while exhaling moist human breath and corrosive enzymatic saliva droplets under a white LED lamp or G-type star shooting out ionizing UV rays. Digital failures tend to be catastrophic, but at least up until the moment it fails, you can make sure that it is the exact same picture or text— And you can make many, many copies very cheaply, all of them very physically durable compared to paper, and know that they are all the exact same picture and text.

That said, I absolutely agree with your overall assessment that most of the information in the early 21st century, including most of the public Internet/WWW, most likely either will be or already is… Maybe not technically lost, per se, given how much caching and saving happens on private clients, but certainly rendered inaccessible.

Ideally I'd really love to see a return of microfiche, actually, using modern polymers and metallization. I've been meaning to look into that for a while now. At a reasonable scale for optical viewing, you could fit… much, much more content than you might expect, and do it several times over, in an entirely reasonable number of pages. Your comment actually spurred me to finally think of a practical way of printing that— for years before, I'd been trying to idly figure out a process based on photomasks and nanoparticles suspended in resin, which had always felt like a very messy and tricky idea, but I just thought of another idea– So thanks for providing some inspiration there.

Even data from the Apollo missions was found to be either degrading (tapes) or the formats were forgotten and the systems that could read them were gone. They had to do research into rediscovering how to read the data and hunt around for the few antique systems remaining to read the tapes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age

This is a hot take

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.

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.

iVerge has been on the decline for nearly a decade now.

I'm surprised anyone takes them seriously at this point.

Did you read the article? Two drives, not one. In 3 months. By the same company. Who is aware of a problem, is trying to hide it, and pushed a firmware update that did not work. Also this second drive was a "safer" replacement the company sent the guy after the first one failed. I say an article about the whole situation is fully warranted

Go build a gaming PC.

Don't forget the table and to use a Swiss Army knife that hopefully has a screwdriver in it.

Ragebait articles generate a lot of clicks ig.

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.

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...

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

That is exactly the type of content LLMs were designed to excel at generating.

You don't have to deal with using a USB to SATA adapter and the drive has a built in enclosure so you can just shove it into a bag or pocket

Is no one mentioning the speed, it can easily go 500+ mbps even with older gen type c ports.

Great if you're working on large files or installing games even.

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

They may have been doing video editing on it. That can be a good amount of read/writes that will wear down a drive.

Vjeran is a supervising producer of a tech site. He should know to back shit up. I'm sure a site as big as The Verge has decent cloud backup.

reviewmeta tries to do this with Amazon reviews

Don't trust media, period.

Is this an issue with MacOS? Even the comment section in the article keeps mentioning that it happens on MacOS.

This is pretty good advice. I don't get why the downvotes.

Yep, this is the way.

That's great

I got a SanDisk Passport for Christmas maybe 10 years ago, it's only like 500gb, but going strong! I do have redundancies though

Read the article before commenting. You got lucky.

Good for you?

Are you willing to accept an article from Ars Technica? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/sandisk-extreme-ssds-keep-abruptly-failing-firmware-fix-for-only-some-promised/

Do you think it's not newsworthy if a manufacturer sells drives with a history of failures, releases a firmware update they claim will fix the issue, sends a replacement drive that also fails, and continues to sell the drives at a deep discount?

Did like none of y'all read the article?

In the article they point out their first drive failed and sandisk replaced it. Now the replacement is dying in the same way. And the drive just so happens to be on clearance now, as if they’re trying to clear out stock.

Also, it’s an SSD, so it’s not a mechanical failure.

I’d expect cum from them

Do you have a portable video camera that supports raid 1?

Try decades. Raid 1 has been around since the 70’s raid 5 since ‘86

The claim here seems to be that the product has an unusual failure rate, the manufacturer has acknowledged the original problem and released a fix, and it does not appear to be fixed. I don't read it as a sob story about some reporter's lost data.

Ooh ooooh look at me everybody I'm so much smarter than this IDIOT that expected the devices he PAID FOR to work as advertised and the company to be honest and straightforward with firmware issues and updates

I run this better system than NORMIES and even if it fails (because I'm an idiot) I DONT CARE ABOUT THE DATA on them because iT DiDn'T mATteR tO Me iN tHe fIrSt PlAcE.

PS For people wondering about the second paragraph, check this guy's other comments in this thread.

These drives have a very different use case than a rack mount NAS. They're portable ruggedized devices for field use, like dumping content from your camera so you can keep shooting. Two would be better but it sounds like a known flaw that is causing random, frequent losses.