1y ago

SanDisk's Name is Now Mud

petapixel.com SanDisk's Name is Now Mud

Poor response to widespread failure reports has resulted in a tarnished reputation.

116 comments

Curse English idioms, I literally thought they were rebranding to Mud.
- I mean, after X it looks downright sensible.
  
  It’s a more down to earth name at least.
- It's because of the capitalization. If the title was "SanDisk's name is now mud" this wouldn't happen.
  
  I mean I get what you're saying, but a title is always capitalized, no?
- I was also very, very confused at first.
  
  I guess I was thinking that if Gwyneth Paltrow could found a company called Goop that anything goes these days.
  
  I'm pretty sure that was the author's intention.
- Wouldn't be the weirdest rebrand recently, honestly
- Good thing it explains it in the second line of the article.
- Me too
- I thought they were pulling a Facebook and rebranded themselves to avoid the bad press.
- Wait…. They’re not doing that? What?

Just an FYI on Sandisk.
They were acquired by Western Digital in 2016.
So this bullshit falls as much at WD's feet as it does their wholly owned subsidiary, Sandisk.
- Wait... Is that true? Holy fuck.
  Edit: Yes. Yes it is. Fuck.
- I completely lost trust in Western Digital after they lied about their NAS drives. Cost me a lot of money that stunt.
- They are still operated pretty separately internally.
  
  These drives were sold under both brands, the response has been the same for both.

50% percent off a product that is almost guaranteed to lead to complete data loss?
By Grabthar's Hammer, what a savings!
- 50% percent off a product that is almost guaranteed to lead to complete data loss?
  Get them for people you hate. 😏
  
  You are a scholar and a gentleman! A prince among men, you might say...
- I came back to comment. I'm still chuckling at your Galaxy Quest quote
  
  I just wish text could convey the soul crushing ennui Rickman displayed when he delivered the line.

Let's be clear that a failing part is one thing but silently dumping them on the public is the unforgivable failure. I hope shareholders are seeing this and selling.
- I hope shareholders are seeing this and selling.
  Sandisk has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital since 2016.
  WD's share price is up 25% this year...
  
  They're saving a ton by not matching our 401ks anymore
  
  But WDC is down almost 10% in the last 10 days
- Yep, and shame on clickbaity tech "news" websites for churning out "awesome deals on SanDisk SSDs!" articles with no mention of the failures.

It took my sleep deprived brain far too long (less than a second, but still) to realise this wasn't a genuine name change.
- Me too! I was thinking, "Why would any brand rebrand themselves to Mud? That is even worse than Twitter rebranding to X!"
- Same. The stupid capitalisation of nouns doesn't help.
  
  I grew up with title case being a thing ☹️

I feel like there's a better way to title this article
- To be honest, I wouldn't even open the post otherwise.

I'm almost certain this article is written by an AI
- Then comes around the summarizer bot
  I used the AI to destroy the AI

There's no way this article wasn't written by AI, the formatting is so weird.

Is this article written by AI?!

No, MY name is Mud- oh, wait, yeah, carry on.
- But call me Aloysius Devadander Abercrombie
  
  That's long for mud, so I've been told

Play the primus song
- Kingston is Winona's Big Brown Beaver
  
  Western digital is Jerry the racecar driver
- 🎶 But call me Aloysius Devadander Abercrombie
  That's long for Mud

They were acquired by Western Digital in 2016, so why not point at WD?

Literally? Are they pulling an Elon?
- For those unfamiliar, the phrase “one’s name is mud” means that a person, or in this case a brand, is widely unpopular due to disgrace or scandal>
- Someone really needs to have a talk with their marketing department.

So what's a better quality option?
- So far I only bought Samsung SSDs
  for internal use and expanded that to Crucial as well.
  Only heard good things about Sabrent, Kioxia and Samsung so far and not much bad.
  
  Samsung consumer SSD have a well-earned black mark on their reputation as of late.
  
  I've bought exclusively WD storage for many years. Mostly because I've never had a failure, and hadn't read anything terrible about reliability. Well, all that changed this year.
  My newest portable drive (Passport Ultra USB-C 2TB) has only 30 hours (40 power cycles) on it, and is clicking/chirping and abnormally slow while writing anything. Probably dying, at least it warned me. It will need to be replaced, at my cost (just out if warranty of course). Combined with SanDisk failures, and complete silence from WD... I'm done with them.
  I'm moving to Samsung. I've already bought a replacement (T7 Shield SSD 2TB), and also an M2 NVME (980 Pro with Heatsink) for PC OS refresh later. Hoping to move almost all the things to Samsung SSDs in coming years, outside of 1-2 large Seagate HDDs for NAS.
  Bye WD. I do not tolerate reliability issues when it comes to data storage. Or silence from companies when there are massive public failures. Or buying out and destroying the competition.
- seconding this
  
  For memory Samsung all day. Micro/SD cards etc the big camera manufacturers source solid stuff if you aren’t a fan of Samsung.
  If you’re talking about readers I don’t think anyone does anything particularly well. Anker might be my preferred brand though. Lots of companies rip them off.

How are Samsung's SSD?
I am looking to buy one external drive of 2 TB for Backup of my multi-media collection and 1 M.2 SSD for my laptop upgrades.
If someone can even specify the model that's known to be good would really be helpful.
- I've been using their evos for awhile and they're solid.
  
  Well, every SSD is [S]olid.
- I've soured on them a bit recently. The 980 Pro firmware bugs hit me on a bunch of machines.
  Samsung refuse to use the Linux Vendor Firmware Service that enables fwupd to apply firmware updates (even though Dell resold Samsung products receive updates here. Thanks Dell!).
  The official Samsung firmware updater image is/was (for years) broken on modern AMD platforms (guess what I was running all of those 10NVMes in?)
  Finally, I had to do [this bloody hack] (https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Samsung_SSD_Firmware) on each machine to get their Firmware updated.
  
  My 980 2tb died due to the firmware and Samsung just refused to reply to any of my warranty requests.
  So I refused to buy their drives, and have since spent about 1k on 16TB of WD drives.
- Yeah Sammy still makes some of the best drives in the industry. However, the company is pretty scummy. So keep that in mind if customer support is important to you. Also bear in mind, they offer no warranty service from Canada, you will be sent to the US centre and from there, it’s all uphill as they will cite region conflicts, etc. RMA will be hit and miss.
  Basically manufacturers now are cutting DRAM from their offerings which means most drives can’t handle large files as that I’ll overflow their paltry buffers and your speeds will plummet to that of a USB drive. WD SN770, Crucial P3, Kingston NV2, all omit DRAM. In fact, most of the cheaper offerings cut the feature on their drives.
  As a general rule, I look at DRAM first, then cell type (try to avoid QLC over TLC), controller type can be important if you have specific needs (I purchased a m.2 to CDEF adapter for my Xbox and it only supports drives with a specific controller), and then warranty and product support.
  In all honesty, this is not a bad list to get you started (not sure I’d put the 990 first, but it’s not crazy either): https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-ssds,3891.html
  
  Thanks for the info and the details.
  I had watched a video some years ago of LTT about DRAM-less SSD and had been actively avoiding them since then. Will surely keep these details in mind.

Waiting for a Primus fan to make the joke
- Primus sucks!

This explains the SanDisk sale on newegg

So what are good brands for SD cards and SSDs?
- For SD complicated, I guess Samsung they seem good quality price.
  
  For anything flash storage, Samsung is the GOAT
- For SSDs? I usually use the big ass SSD Google sheets.
  
  Google sheets?

Thanks Western Digital!

Had an SSD of theirs fail and it took weeks to get a warranty replacement out and was the biggest hassle ever. If the customer service was tolerable I'd have considered renting, but even without this news I'd never buy or recommend them.

like the fake names of its clones on Aliexpress.

Damn sandisk is really that bad? That’s sad but fuck em

Eh I've had good experiences with them.
- And now you won't if you buy more from them.

116 comments