Western Digital has now tacitly admitted that its SanDisk Excessive Professional transportable solid-state drives had been critically damaged in any case — by issuing a firmware replace that’ll hopefully preserve the 4TB mannequin from wiping your information all by itself. (Severely.)

However as Ars Technica reviews, there’s no point out of any repair for the 2TB mannequin, and I feel it’s time to sound the alarm — as a result of this firm has been downplaying the problem for months, all whereas it continues to promote these drives at a steep low cost.

Over two months in the past, my good friend and Verge supervising producer Vjeran Pavic advised me he’d misplaced a whole 4TB SanDisk Excessive Professional price of video clips. Utterly gone with no hint. (Fortunately, he’d already backed up all that footage to the cloud.)

SSD failure does occur, however one thing weirder was occurring right here — when he tried including a number of the information again, they began disappearing one after the other.

And when he contacted a SanDisk buyer help agent, he was advised that they couldn’t change his drive as a result of the 4TB mannequin was being recalled. They labored out a deal to swap it for a pair of 2TB models as a substitute — however he hasn’t truly obtained them as a result of the corporate’s RMA system was down amidst a knowledge breach.

Sadly, as Ars reviews, the 2TB mannequin could also be vulnerable to the problem as effectively. Ars Technica editor Lee Hutchinson has had two of the 2TB Excessive Professionals die on him, with their complete filesystem wiped, and there are comparable complaints on-line.

I really feel responsible for not writing about this concern earlier, however there have been causes we held off. First, there was proof the 4TB mannequin was nonetheless on sale and not truly being recalled. Second, once we contacted WD concerning the concern in March, the corporate advised us it was “actively investigating” a “small variety of reviews,” downplaying the issue.

However Vjeran rightly tweeted a warning when he observed the corporate had began placing the drives on deep low cost:

And at the moment, with WD’s tacit admission, there’s definitely no approach that I might purchase this drive with out unbiased third-party testing that the problem is gone.