Class Actions Seek to Hold Western Digital Accountable for Flawed SanDisk SSDs

Two class actions filed a short time apart Thursday by different law firms, both in U.S. District Court for Northern California in San Jose, accuse SanDisk and parent company Western Digital of marketing defective solid-state drives, and doing little or nothing to fix the problem.

The SSDs “face an extreme risk of failing within months or even days of purchase due to a design and manufacturing defect,” alleged plaintiff Saif Jafri of Buena Park, California, in one of the class actions 5:23-cv-04206. Users began complaining online early in 2023 that the SSDs were “suddenly, and without warning, wiping data and, in some cases, becoming unreadable,” said co-plaintiffs Matthew Perrin and Brian Bayerl of Florida in the other class action (docket 5:23-cv-04201). Western Digital doesn't comment on pending litigation, emailed a spokesperson Friday.

Hundreds of thousands of consumers and working professionals “who have trusted SanDisk to safely store their data have lost untold terabytes with only a paperweight in the shape of an SSD to show for it,” alleged Jafri’s complaint. “No reasonable consumer would pay hundreds of dollars for a storage device that has a high likelihood of failing at any time and causing permanent data loss,” it said.

This defect in the SanDisk SSDs “goes to their core functionality” as a memory storage device, said Jafri’s complaint. “For many consumers, this means transferring over thousands of photos and videos of precious moments with family and friends,” among other personal data, it said: “Yet once these SSD fail, this data is irretrievably lost, like the burning of the library at Alexandria.”

Western Digital has downplayed the issue for months, “while continuing to encourage consumers to save more and more of their life’s memories on these devices,” said Jafri’s complaint. The company’s “one and only attempt” at fixing the defect in May 2023 was unsuccessful, it said. Despite this, Western Digital continues to sell the SSDs “and has even placed them on steep discount in what outwardly appears to be an effort at clearing its shelves of defective stock,” it said. “But no recall, reimbursement, or replacement program has been announced,” it said.

After “months of inaction,” Western Digital finally admitted in May that the SanDisk SSDs had a firmware problem, said the Perrin-Bayerl complaint. It released a firmware update that “purported to resolve issues on some of the SanDisk SSDs that are regularly failing customers,” it said. But the purported fix hasn’t “resolved anything,” and consumers “continue to have their products fail,” it said. This is causing them “to lose the valuable data they stored on the SanDisk SSDs, and defeating the purpose of owning a SanDisk SSD in the first place,” it said.

These issues are having “a material impact on the value of the SanDisk SSDs” that Perrin and Bayerl bought, said their complaint. In light of the SSD’s “unreliability,” the plaintiffs and their potential class members “can no longer realistically use the SanDisk SSDs for fear of losing all of their data,” it said. Amid Western Digital’s long-term knowledge of the SanDisk SSDs’ defects and “their continued efforts to suppress that information from being disclosed to the public,” Perrin and Bayerl “believe that additional information supporting their claims will be uncovered following a reasonable opportunity for discovery in this action,” it said.