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Comment by short_throw | Hacker News Reader

I'm 2 for 2 with SanDisk ssds suddenly dieing due to the controller going out way short of the drive's expected life.

That was years before this issue but my rule of never buying a SanDisk product again is serving me well.

Sandisk "industrial" SD cards are the only ones that have died on me (and no, they didn't come from Amazon but from a reliable source)

I've had equally bad luck with SanDisk's MicroSD cards. Samsung cards rarely ever go out to lunch in my Raspberry Pi systems, but I've never had a SanDisk card last more than six months.

As (sometimes six-year-old) Samsung cards get retired, I've gone to... Samsung. This time, I'm getting their cards intended for surveillance cameras and other write-intensive duty.

I bought 3 Samsung EVO 256G cards last year for a dash cam, all of them failed around 36 days - no return but just warranty with Samsung. Samsung’s customer service for storage products is pretty bad that there is not even a website to submit a warranty claim.

Switched to Sandisk then it has not failed after a year, I probably will never buy Samsung cards.

You're buying counterfeits.

This is a much larger problem than people realize and it’s getting harder and harder to avoid them.

I may end up buying SD cards at the local farm and game store for the trail cameras because hopefully nobody is counterfeiting those.

Uh, no, unless the SanDisk cards that were packaged with official Pi 400 kits were counterfeit.

> cards that were packaged with official Pi 400 kits were counterfeit

Why not? Company needed SD cards, they bought them and packaged with their kits. It could be from literally any source. Even with official SandIsk partnership.

Strange, I have the exact opposite. Every single one of my Samsung cards have failed, but not a single SanDisk. As my Samsungs failed, I replaced them with Sandisks, which have all been going for quite a number of years now.

I had a phantom issue of my PC not booting (black lit screen) unless cold for about 30 minutes that followed me across 2 different builds. I eventually - after going through every other component - figured out it was a bad SanDisk SSD that wasn't even a boot drive simply not responding to ATA commands and the MSI BIOS simply didn't have a timeout during early boot disk iteration. It was extra weird because that drive worked fine if it initialized correctly.

I have not bought a WD or SanDisk drive since, I'm still very pissed that I spent days debugging this issue, decided I needed to scrap the entire machine and then still had the issue. Who thinks of a bad drive as a reason you can't even boot into BIOS?!

I’ve also suffered a SanDisk controller failure on an SSD years back. Been doing Samsung ever since.

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