Western Digital (WD) recently got hit with a lawsuit from a US citizen based in California. The claimant Nathan Krum says that his 2TB SanDisk Extreme Pro portable SSD had thrashed all of the data he had stored in it.
Krum says that the reason his WD SanDisk Portable SSD failed was because of a flaw that the parent company failed to disclose Worse still, the flaw isn’t isolated to the Extreme Pro SSD: it also affects Extreme Portable, Extrem Pro Portable, as well as My Passport SSD models made in 2023. “The SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD hard drives, which are also sold under the WD My Passport brand, have a firmware issue that causes them to disconnect or become unreadable by computers,” Krum says.
Krum isn’t the only individual that has aired their grievances about WD and its failing storage products. According to The Register, the brand has received complaints from several other customers that have reported drive failures and data loss on the brand’s SSDs. To that end, Krum’s lawsuit also says the company knows about the problem, yet is still not doing enough about it.
“For reasons that defendants have yet to fully explain or disclose, without warning these hard drives have wiped out data stored on them, making the files stored on them unable to be accessed and users unable or unwilling to use these drives out of the reasonable concern such data will be lost forever or cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars to recover.”
It should be noted that WD had issued a firmware update for some of its SSD models. This was back in May, and the storage brand’s update was basically for the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD V2, Extreme Pro Portable V2, and My Passport SSDs, where said products would unexpectedly disconnect from a user’s PC. However, Krum makes it explicitly clear that the issue was more than just a mild irritating disconnection; this was full-on data being thrashed and deleted without their knowledge.
Again, Krum isn’t the only victim of the WD bug. Just recently, The Verge’s Sean Hollister wrote about the issue, with his colleague who owned a SanDisk Extreme Pro having lost 3TB of video that they had shot for the site and, to put it in Hollister’s words, he was furious.
At the time of writing, WD has yet to respond to the lawsuit from Nathan Krum.
(Source: The Register, The Verge)
