It doesn't look like a firmware fix will be enough.

SanDisk Extreme Pro Failures Result From Design and Manufacturing Flaws, Says Data Recovery Firm::A data recovery specialist from Austria uncovers several possible hardware reasons for the Extreme Pro’s failures.

  • @[email protected]English
    13•1 year ago

    I’m fed up with external hard drives. Every single one I get fails within 2 years. I got a Western Digital “my passport” 2TB hard drive and it only took a year to start making loud clicking noises (failure imminent). Are there any ones out there that are actually built to last, or am I just unlucky?

    • NateEnglish
      40•1 year ago

      Get a cheap 2.5" SATA enclosure or an m.2 enclosure and throw a real SSD in it. That’s what I’ve been doing and I get significantly higher speeds for significantly cheaper, as well as not having any fail on me

      • UglyheadEnglish
        11•1 year ago

        Yep. A good enclosure with a well rated drive in it is the way to go. Easy peasy to put together and/or pull apart if something goes wrong or you want to upgrade your storage capacity.

      • @[email protected]English
        3•1 year ago

        Dont use SSDs for offline backups. The flash storage can experience random bit flips if not powered on every now and then.

        • @[email protected]English
          22•1 year ago

          Do you have more info?

          The minimum specs I’ve seen for NAND flash chips are 10 year retention time at room temperature.

          Being powered on isn’t enough to change this, the firmware would have to be actively reading, erasing and writing blocks of data to refresh them. I’m sure there are some that will do this, but it would increases some other data loss risks, wear rates and power draw; so I suspect (?) it’s not universal.

          • @[email protected]English
            6•1 year ago

            My professor told me this fact in class, but upon searching for papers I did not find anything to support it.

            So probably you are right.

            • @[email protected]English
              5•1 year ago

              Me having some datasheets that claim one thing doesn’t mean it applies to everything and every implementation. Your prof might be right.