By Sean Hollister , a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CN

Buyer beware: some SanDisk Extreme SSDs are wiping people’s data

submited by

Style Pass

2023-05-23 12:00:03

By Sean Hollister , a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.

Western Digital has now tacitly admitted that its SanDisk Extreme Pro portable solid-state drives were critically broken after all — by issuing a firmware update that’ll hopefully keep the 4TB model from wiping your data all by itself. (Seriously.)

But as Ars Technica reports, there’s no mention of any fix for the 2TB model, and I think it’s time to sound the alarm — because this company has been downplaying the issue for months, all while it continues to sell these drives at a steep discount.

Over two months ago, my friend and Verge supervising producer Vjeran Pavic told me he’d lost an entire 4TB SanDisk Extreme Pro worth of video clips. Completely gone with no trace. (Thankfully, he’d already backed up all that footage to the cloud.)

SSD failure does happen, but something weirder was going on here — when he tried adding some of the files back, they started disappearing one by one.