Western Digital has been sued over allegations that its SanDisk Extreme Pro SSDs, including those in the Extreme Portable, Extreme Pro Portable, and WD My Passport families, have some sort of defect that could lead to random disconnects or, worse, irrevocable loss of data. “The SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD hard drives, which are also sold under the WD My Passport brand, have a firmware issue that causes them to disconnect or become unreadable by computers,” claimed plaintiff Nathan Krum, whose class-action filing, dated August 15, also alludes to what’s been described as “widely reported drive failures and data loss.” The lawsuit comes just a few months after Western Digital launched an update that was meant to resolve random disconnects with SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD V2 and other devices.
In May, Western Digital issued an update to address “a firmware issue that can cause SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD V2, SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD V2, and WD My Passport SSD products to unexpectedly disconnect from a computer.”
That patch was intended for the following products: SanDisk Extreme Portable 4TB (SDSSDE61-4T00), SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable 4TB (SDSSDE81-4T00), SanDisk Extreme Pro 2TB (SDSSDE81-2T00), SanDisk Extreme Pro 1TB (SDSSDE81-1T00), and WD My Passport 4TB (WDBAGF0040BGY).
According to Krum, the problem is much more than a disconnection annoyance: “It is not simply a connection issue – data is being lost without warning, and class members are reporting an inability to access and retrieve data they have stored on their devices.”