#and trying to find the size/price I wanted while making sure it'd fit my motherboard narrowed it down to WD

[andrevasims]

Apparently the SanDisk portable SSD is/was a hot Black Friday deal, but they've been so prone to failing that a class-action lawsuit was filed over it.

I also saw people recommended Western Digital as an alternative to SanDisk, but... Western Digital owns SanDisk. The class-action lawsuit for the failing SanDisk drives is directed at Western Digital.

Specifically, they single out the following devices: SanDisk Extreme Pro, SanDisk Extreme, and Western Digital My Passport SSD in the sizes 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB.

Some of them, like the 4TB Extreme Pro Portable, had discounts up to $200, which is a pretty solid deal considering they've knowingly been facing widespread hardware failures for over 6 months.

I never bought one, but I did have a Western Digital Elements external HD that my dad got me as a gift. It would randomly disconnect itself without being touched, and when I tried to unplug then replug it in, I had to do it 3 or 4 times in a row before it would get recognized again. We bought a new connecting cable since that seemed to be the problem, but it continued doing that with the new cable. Also, idk if it came this way or if it happened over time, but sectors on the external HD became corrupted to the point where my computer would get a Blue Screen of Death every time I tried copying files onto it. I got around that by using the 3rd party program TeraCopy instead of the built-in Windows copying program, but like...

My dad got me that external HD specifically because I've had 2 unrecoverable hard drive failures happen to me several years apart when I was a kid. Losing writing, drawings, photos, conversation logs with friends, stuff that just no longer exists at all. So I became pretty paranoid about backup storage. And having my backup storage randomly disconnect by itself and crash my computer when I try to use it... Obviously not ideal.

Anyway, the new external HD I got to replace that one is SeaGate. I don't know if that's "better," there's a 100% chance people have stories about SeaGate's products that are exactly like mine with Western Digital. So I'm just hoping for the best lol ¯\_(ツ)_/¯