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WD refused to answer our questions about its self- wiping SanDisk SSDs
(www.theverge.com)
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Why do companies have to behave so shady 😔
There's aren't a lot of manufacturers producing 512GB+ micro sd cards... not sure if Sandisk/WD is worth the risk after this news
I wonder how representative the Extreme portable drives are to their SD cards. SanDisk cards have always been extremely reliable. I assume the Extreme drives are fabricated in a different factory or even outsourced to some random Shenzhen plant. Worrying is the idea that they’ve done the same with SD cards.
These failures don’t have to do with where they’re manufactured - it seems like this is some sort of firmware bug. NAND doesn’t really just choose to wipe itself at random. Actual NAND chip failures are few and far-between, so this is very likely much more than a hardware issue.
That said, I personally have done a lot of testing with WD-manufactured NAND, compared other companies’ NAND - and the WD NAND is pretty crap. I can’t really go into further details than that, though.
Source - I’m an SSD firmware engineer.
We assume WD isn’t outsourcing their firmware engineering. That could explain why they’re so quiet.
I’d personally be super surprised if they were outsourcing their firmware engineering - but I do suppose it’s technically possible.