A new report from a data recovery company points to design and manufacturing flaws as the root cause of a recent spate of SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD failures, a flaw that has prompted a class-action lawsuit. In May this year, some of Western Digital's SanDisk Extreme Pro 4TB solid-state drives experienced sudden data loss; at this time, the company promised to provide firmware updates for users of the 4TB model. However, the same problem exists with the 2TB and 3TB models, and Western Digital has not committed to firmware updates for these drives.
Markus Häfele, general manager of data recovery company Attingo, said the problem lies with the hardware, not the firmware, which would explain why there are no firmware updates for these models of SanDisk drives and that SanDisk has remained silent on the source of the problem.
Attingo, who has been in the data recovery business for more than 25 years, has recently seen SanDisk Extreme Pro SSDs fail at least once a week. The problem seems quite complex. According to Häfele, the components used in these SSDs are too large for the circuit board, resulting in weak connections that easily break under high impact and temperature. Not only that, but the solder material used to connect these components is prone to bubble formation and breakage.
It's unclear whether cheap solder, components, or both are causing the problem. However, these newer versions of the SanDisk Extreme Pro SSDs appear to have been modified with additional epoxy to secure overly large components. This suggests that Western Digital may have been aware of the hardware issue. Still, these newer models continue to fail, so data recovery service customers have to turn to companies like Atingo.
The issue appears to affect multiple product lines, and Western Digital's handling of the situation, particularly its communications with customers and the media, has been criticized. After losing your data, you often need expensive data recovery services to get your precious files back, and you also need to be lucky. The media noticed that after May, 2TB capacity SSDs using this brand also lost data, and at that time, Western Digital only committed to firmware updates for 4TB hard drives.
There are various reasons why NAND memory-based hard drives lose data. Sometimes, the flash drive itself may have manufacturing defects that can lead to data loss. This is more common with low-quality or counterfeit hard drives, but it usually doesn't happen with genuine products purchased from reputable retailers like Amazon. To make matters worse, these external SSDs are targeted even at creative professionals.