Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsFailed after 15 months. Hindsight, advice to others consider an SSD purchase.
Reviewed in Canada on March 27, 2024
Amazon always deletes my reviews when I state a product is sub-par or I've had a poor experience.
This drive failed suddenly. It was my Windows 10 boot drive as well as my main data disk, and it failed without the usual warnings, disk faults, event logs, slow boot etc.
I had a backup image of the complete drive, all partitions etc so no huge problem.
I raised a warranty claim with Western Digital ( SanDisk ). I had to send them zoomed in photos of the drive and a copy of the sales receipt which I did. Twice, because they didn't spend the time to look into the system to see the files were already uploaded when I filled out the claim form.
I included detailed information about the nature of the data on the drive. All personal, banking, financial and all of my design documents.
With the RMA approval, I was notified that I would have to mail them the failed drive.
I got assurances that nobody would be able to gain access to the files.
The problem is that the drive failed in read-only mode and I couldn't erase it.
I tried to clear the read-only bit using Diskpart - Attributes Disk Clear Readonly etc.
I could read the data but I couldn't write. (Windows won't boot a drive that is write protected}
That didn't work. My only option was to destroy the drive. WD was clearly not going to replace it unless I sent all my personal data to them in a padded envelope.
Warning - in hindsight, it would have been better to enable encryption on this drive and to accept the performance penalty for activating the security feature. This way, there would be little chance of someone foraging through my personal files.
I got lucky because I had a recent backup. Don't get caught unprepared.
Make backups, enable encryption and keep an eye for SSD degredation.