Western Digital (WD) has been sued in the U.S. for failing WD SanDisk 2TB Extreme Pro SSDs. Several other models also allegedly suffer from the underlying issues that cause these devices to fail. Moreover, WD recently issued an update that only exacerbates the problem.
According to the plaintiffs of the multi-person class action suit, an undisclosed error caused a WD SanDisk 2TB Extreme Pro SSD to not work. The error also allegedly occurred in other models from the hard drive and SSD manufacturer, including SanDisk Extreme Portable, Extreme Pro Portable and WD My Passport SSD models. Customers online recently reported frequent problems with non-working hard drives and data loss.
Error in firmware
WD is said to be aware of the error, but is not communicating about it. Therefore, only minor details are known about the error. More specifically, the underlying issue is in the firmware. The problem causes the affected portable SSDs to be disconnected from computers or become unreadable spontaneously.
The drives randomly fail in various ways, causing data not to be stored correctly or file-system corruption. In either case, this prevents users from accessing their data.
Update exacerbates problem
In the month of May, WD released an update that was supposed to fix a problem of “disconnection” for several portable SanDisk SSD models. However, according to the complaint, the issue is not just disconnection, but much worse, data loss.
Moreover, a bug in recent update July this year would also only amplify the problems. WD says it is aware of this and says the bug not only causes disconnection, but also causes the disk to go into read-only mode. As a result, it is not possible to write new data or delete old data.
It is unknown how many WD SanDisk portable SSDs are affected by the bug. What is certain, however, is that the error is widespread, as replacement copies also had the same error.
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