SanDisk Portable SSDs Are Failing So Frequently, We Can No Longer Recommend Them | Hacker News Reader

SanDisk Portable SSDs Are Failing So Frequently, We Can No Longer Recommend Them

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90 pointsmikece29 comments

Portable storage devices should only be treated as temporary storage. Use them for sneakernet, not as a working drive or a place to park important backups. Even in high-end portable drives like this that are just a M.2 NVMe SSD in an enclosure, you still have to worry about bugs in the NVMe to USB bridge chip and unreliable connectivity and power delivery over USB.

There was a time period where it almost made sense to use 2.5" SATA SSDs in hot-swap bays as if they were floppy disks. Unfortunately, the form factor proved unnecessarily bulky for the PC form factors that are popular today, and SATA was a dead-end for performance. But a typical consumer SATA SSD is durable enough for portable usage and more reliable than anything involving USB.

Temporary storage, yes, but they are marketed as rugged and reliable external SSD for photographers and film makers to use for storing their images/video on rather than filling up their MacBook Pro out in the field. Very disappointing.

Taking storage marketing at face value is also a serious mistake that you'll eventually regret.

How, pray tell, are people supposed to determine that certain categories/manufacturers of drives are inherently unreliable? It’s not as though most of us run dozens of them for long periods of time to evaluate their reliability.

Most of us wait for someone who does do so to spread the news. Which is what is now happening.

> How, pray tell, are people supposed to determine that certain categories/manufacturers of drives are inherently unreliable?

Certainly not by thinking the marketing department is giving you the full story. I don't have a problem with news like this being reported. What I have a problem with is acting like it's a surprise, or acting like a user who loses 3TB of data because of the failure of a single portable drive is a blameless victim (especially when the failed drive in question was a warranty replacement for a previous drive failure).

That doesn’t really answer the question.

How do you determine which ones are good, at the point of sale?

> How do you determine which ones are good, at the point of sale?

You don't. That information is not provided at the point of sale. You either research the products elsewhere before making a buying decision, or you make a purchase knowing it's somewhat of a gamble. (Occasionally Amazon/Newegg reviews may tip you off to important issues with a product, but that's an extremely poor signal-to-noise source of information.) Many people are quite happy to rationalize away the anxiety of that gamble by reassuring themselves with brand loyalty, which is how we get into situations like what prompted this article.

You need to have a backup of any important data. Even with a reliable drive, you could still lose or destroy it. Reliability should only be a cost issue where you have to buy a new one.

I'm genuinely surprised that this has to be said, but I guess it does.

All marketing distorts the truth and omits unflattering information. Some marketing simply lies outright. If the information is coming from marketing materials or salespeople, you cannot consider it trustworthy on its face.

Yes... but when they put 3 and 5 year warranties on devices that suggests that at least enlightened self interest will make sure they that quality control goes into the products.

That's a huge, and rather meaningless, overreaction.

I'm sure others have their own personal anecdotes. Here's mine: I've run a number of Linux installs directly off Samsung external ssd's. Heck, I've used multiple Samsung miniature USB flash drives (so, not their fastest USB flash drives) as permanent installs (mainly for chromebooks with limited internal, non-replaceable drives) - they just extrude a tiny amount, so one can just leave them in, and treat them as permanent storage.

It just ... works. For ... years.

SanDisk sticks and ssds (especially their mini USB sticks) on the other hand, always seem to run too hot. Try a different manufacturer.

For what it's worth, I have both a SATA-based Samsung portable SSD and a NVMe-based SanDisk portable SSD, and they've both been almost completely trouble-free for me—though I am careful in how I use them. I'm definitely not the disgruntled customer you seem to think I am (especially because both of those drives were review samples).

For the smaller USB-native flash drives, I have not noticed any particular pattern to their unreliability, but I trust them even less because that product segment is a dumping grounds for low-grade flash memory.

For NVMe-based portable SSDs in particular, I am wary in part because of the long-running thread on the AnandTech forums documenting how all three suppliers of NVMe to USB bridge chips (JMicron, Realtek, ASMedia) have had extensive problems with both reliability and compatibility. Companies like Samsung and SanDisk can certainly be expected to do more QA on their products incorporating those chips than smaller brands, but that's not a guarantee that they'll avoid the problems from their upstream supplier.

All storage is temporary.

Someone once told me "Data can't exist reliably without a backup."

And "Backups aren't backups unless they're tested."

True, but not all to the same degree, and that difference actually matters. So your comment is pretty much vacuous.

You are temporary. (Skull) And yet you are known and likely trusted by some.

I use them and have had no issues, but it is worrying how hot they get, even when idle. They are warm when not being used at all which seems wrong.

Of course I back them up to a 8tb portable hdd weekly using borg. You should do that no matter what brand of ssd you use!

Just curious, which 8TB portable HDD are you using? Was just looking for something like this

I was mistaken, it's 5TB: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07X41PWTY?ref_=pe_27063361_4873...

It's the size of a pack of cards and has one USB 3 plug for power. Unfortunately the larger ones are quite a bit bulkier.

2.5" drives over 2TB are all SMR. It's not a good experience moving more than a few GB at once, it just pauses for tens of seconds.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording ?

With borg I'm doing incremental backups and while slow, borg seems fairly slow anyway so I haven't noticed.

I wonder if it will get much slower once more of the disk has been written to.

Damn, I have a few of these. I keep them backed up to a RAID setup but still disappointing to hear.

That's unfortunate. I just bought one of these a month ago. I've noticed it gets really hot when it's not even being accessed or used, just plugged in. Like really hot.

> One Reddit user, Filmmaking_David, highlights that the issue “comes hot on the heels of massive discounts on these drives in the past few months.” This is something that The Verge also noted back in May.

Oh boy. Bit excited to find out more about this.

Well that's funny, since I intended to use some for backups.

Ah, reading between the lines here looks like the problems have been with the devices that are 2TB and up so it looks like I'm safe with my 1TB SanDisk. Dodged another bullet.

My 1TB died and they sent me a replacement that looks rather beefy and upgraded. But I lost all my data. And apparently the new one is just as bad.

So no, dont _trust_ that drive too much :)

What brand do people recommend instead?

Tested backups.

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