Tell HN: My WD Blue SA510 SSD died after 5 months

14 points by Aperocky 3y ago ↗ HN

Fired up my gaming PC after 2 months hiatus for a game day, surprised that the entire disk where my games were stored was gone.

Went to bios, saw that the drive was attempting to intermittently connect (and fail). Thought it's a connection problem, replaced the SATA cable, same thing. Took the drive out and plug it onto an USB SATA reader, could not get it to read. I only recently (Nov 2022) upgraded to this SSD (from older HDD).

So I searched online and it turns out it was a very common problem with the recent WD Blue SA510s. Will not be posting review links for HN but they are straightforwardly found on Amazon and WD website itself, please check them out (and might need to skip the older, very good ratings).

If you're looking for a cheap SSD drive, or have a recent (2022) version of this drive, be warned! I use steam, store my own mod scripts on github, so didn't really lose anything except a good game day, and need to replace the drive. I can't imagine how painful it is to lose it with a bunch of work on it.

13 comments

[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 36.2 ms ] thread

nateb2022 3y ago ↗

Was it under warranty? Assuming you bought it new?

Aperocky 3y ago ↗

Bought it new from Best Buy, so I should have no problem returning it. And I'm 100% not going to get a replacement of the same drive.

arprocter 3y ago ↗

fwiw when it comes to SATA I've had good luck with Crucial MX500

Aperocky 3y ago ↗

Update: Was able to replace at no cost, switched to Samsung, wired the drive and straight to games.

theandrewbailey 3y ago ↗

> I use steam, store my own mod scripts on github, so didn't really lose anything except a good game day, and need to replace the drive. I can't imagine how painful it is to lose it with a bunch of work on it.

International Backup Awareness Day is every day.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/international-backup-awareness...

xupybd 3y ago ↗

If you are looking for data on SSD life backblaze runs them at scale and reports failure rates.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-edition-2022-drive-stats-...

Aperocky 3y ago ↗

I think this problem mostly are concerning the new ones (late 2022 - ), so it's going to be interesting to see the data in a few months. Already lots of online anecdotes to add my personal experience to.

jmclnx 3y ago ↗

I just picked up a WD Blue HDD, fingers crossed :) I am still not comfortable with SSD, but I have one in a newest system.

Hope you can return it for a replacement.

haunter 3y ago ↗

https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detailweb/a_id/50208/~...

Aperocky 3y ago ↗

I've already replaced it.

Even if I didn't, it's not clear on how I'm supposed to do that on a drive that already bricked.

splix 3y ago ↗

Maybe SSD are more prone to failures. I had a Samsung 980 Pro which died after a couple of months. Recently bought a SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD and it started to corrupt data just after a couple of weeks of use.

wsgeorge 3y ago ↗

I've learned to not trust external hard drives, so my most important work is backed up locally and on redundant cloud accounts. However, I've heard too many horror stories about WD. Is this a thing?

Also, a hard drive ratings site will be a good public service.

Grum9 3y ago ↗

https://www.techspot.com/news/97909-ssd-reliability-only-sli...