Over the past few months there have been reports of issues with SanDisk portable SSDs and Western Digital released a firmware update in May that was meant to prevent the drives from "unexpectedly disconnect from a computer". However, it appears that this firmware update didn't solve the problem and Western Digital is now being taken to court over drives not just having disconnect issues, but also randomly failing. The court case is expected to become a class action suit, as the plaintiff claims that the issue of failing drives affect tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people in the USA.

The models included in the complaint includes the SanDisk Extreme Pro, Extreme Portable, Extreme Pro Portable and WD My Passport SSD. A further firmware update was released in July, which is said to have made the issues even worse, with data being lost on drives or being inaccessible to drive owners. In some cases the drives go into read only mode, but sometimes this means that the drives become inaccessible to the OS, which in turn also means dataloss to the user. Time will tell how this plays out, but it's not looking great for Western Digital, but it wouldn't be the first time a storage device maker has been taken to court over failing products.

No, that isn't a major typo on this article's headline. According to print magazine c't, who conducted a test bench consisting of two pieces each of OCZ's TR150, Crucial's BX 200, Samsung's 750 Evo, Samsung's 850 Pro, SanDisk's Extreme Pro and SanDisk's Ultra II, the last SSD to actually give out the last breath was Samsung's 256 GB 850 Pro, with a staggering 9100 TB (that's 9.1 Petabytes) written. This is well beyond Samsung's suggested longevity for this particular SSD, which stands at 150 TBW.

The first particular model to give out was one of Crucial's BX 200, at 187 TBW (still more than twice over the manufacturer's 80 TBW). The second model to fail was the second Crucial BX 200, at 280 TBW. The remaining SSDs apparently died after a power peak (unclear whether a surge or a spike), save for the Pro models, in the form of SanDisk's Extreme Pro and Samsung's 850 Pro (it seems those Pro-oriented features do serve some purpose, eh?.) One of these SanDisk Extreme Pro models lasted for about 2,200 TBW, the same amount of writes the first Samsung 850 Pro model endured. However, the second Samsung 850 Pro broke through all records with its total 9,100 TB written. Naturally, these are interesting and impressive overall results, but they can't really be counted upon as being statistically significant; two models each aren't enough to achieve a representation of the tested SSD models' endurance. However, this also probably means that save a defect on your SSD's manufacturing, you can count on it for a considerable amount of writes.