I've had issues with WD Blue recently. MacOS intermittently wouldn't boot on a 3-month-old drive. I wonder how much is shared between this product and the Sandisk, given that WD now own Sandisk?
Wow, I didnt realize WD owns Sandisk. And i was always pretty satisfied with Sandisk tbh, and i also have this Extreme SSD, but this is making me reconsider somewhat…
I told myself I'd never again buy a WD drive when I realised the WD Red NAS drives I bought were completely unsuitable for NAS because they secretely replaced the product line with SMR drives.
And now you are telling me that the Sandisk SSD I bought as a replacement also has a fatal design flaw? And apparently Sandisk is a WD subsidiary?
I'm feeling slightly less bad about spending a fortune on getting a bigger built-in SSD in my Macbook. Please don't tell me they are flawed as well.
As a side note, WD bought SanDisk. While they had bought STEC before this, SanDisk brought scale and much larger engineering force. WD had a great brand, and these two things may work together for them.
Toshiba and Seagate. Hitachi split into WD (aka HGST) and Toshiba.
This WD dumbassery seems like its mostly on the WD side. I'm not aware of any dumb decisions being made on the HGST-side of the WD company yet. It should also be noted that Sandisk is also owned by WD.
This reminded me of shopping for an SSD. I found Western Digital and Sandisk versions of the same drive). All the stats were the same, and they were most likely the same hardware with a different label (WD owns Sandisk). One had a higher review. What's interesting is different people will purchase each, so you're actually getting a different set of reviewers, so the ratings could be genuinely different.
I bought a WD SSD recently and when I plugged it in, the firmware reported that is was actually a SanDisk, which is I guess a lower-end WD brand at this point. I saw an Internet discussion of other people having this problem with a July 2020 batch of SSDs, so I texted into Amazon support which promised to send a WD drive that didn't report itself as a SanDisk drive to the system.
I'm sure you can guess where this goes. The replacement unit arrived a few days later-- this drive also was marked WD on the outside and identified itself to BIOS etc. as a SanDisk drive. I called Amazon support again and they appeared to consider it a manufacturing defect and I returned it for a refund.
I'm not sure how much I care about whether the drive is SanDisk or WD, but it ought to be consistent. If WD can't get that simple step right I'm not sure why I should trust them to secure and maintain the integrity of a TB of important data.
With is what WD are doing, having just been caught changing parts in a way that impacts performance
> A Western Digital spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the company had replaced the NAND flash and updated the firmware in the WD Blue SN550 beginning in June 2021 and updated the drive's data sheet to reflect the changes. "For greater transparency going forward, if we make a change to an existing internal SSD, we commit to introducing a new model number whenever any related published specifications are impacted"
To me this reeks of Western Digital style dishonesty[1][2]. I was wondering how long it would take for the new parent company to rub off on SanDisk and I guess I have my answer. My suggestion is to stay the hell away from anything Western Digital (and now SanDisk) if accurate specs are important to your use case.
https://community.wd.com/t/wd-blue-250-gb-sa510-issues/27981...
https://community.wd.com/t/wd-blue-sa510-sata-ssds-critical-...
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