Western Digital is being sued for faulty external drives. If the lawsuit takes place, the American company could have to compensate hundreds of thousands of customers.
A Californian citizen files a class action lawsuit against Western Digital. He accuses the hard drive maker of selling faulty external SSDs. According to the complainant, the Santa Clara company was aware of this malfunction, but did not still nothing to fix it.
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Nathan Krum had purchased an external SSD from Western Digital, the SanDisk 2TB Extreme Pro, which quickly proved faulty. The issue has reportedly been repeatedly reported to the Santa Clara company since January 2023, as according to Krum, “SanDisk Extreme Pro SSDs, also sold under the WD My Passport brand, have a firmware issue that disconnects or renders them unreadable by computers. This contradicts the belief that hard drives are becoming less reliable, unlike SSDs.
A US customer takes WD to court over its SSDs that erase user data
Not to mention the amount spent, $180 for the Extreme Pro, the biggest detriment to users is the permanent loss of the data contained in the disc of ther. In the complaint filed with the Court of San Jose, the plaintiff argues that users can no longer reasonably use these products, knowing that they risk “erasing the data stored therein or making them inaccessible”. It is very legitimately that they fear that they are “lost forever or that their recovery costs hundreds or even thousands of euros “.
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As this is a class action lawsuit in the United States, consumers whose SanDisk or WD SSDs fail can therefore join the plaintiff and seek damages. This could affect thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of users in the United States alone. Western Digital therefore has a lot to lose in this situation..
Source: The Register