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 agree, I've naively trusted the SanDisk brand but just today I went compared and bought an SSD, didn't even look a WD or SanDisk. Their name is now tainted in my book.
SanDisk is still SanDisk and I don't consider them to be Western Digital. Their products have always been dodgy and I still have heartburn over some of their thumb drives where it was impossible to remove the shovel-ware installed on them. It will continue to be nothing other than Samsung products for me in the foreseeable future.
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.
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.
Personally I won't buy another WD or Sandisk product ever again. Companies like this don't ever really come off as being sorry for the scams they pull, so it's best to just cut them off completely. I de-Googled too because of their shady practices.
EDIT: For those who can't use the Internet to look things up, Sandisk and G-Technology and some random thing called Upthere are all WD brands.
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.
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.
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?
I will never purchase another Western Digital product unless they make a MAJOR about-face on this. Western Digital owns SanDisk, so that goes for them too.
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.
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