1TB WD Blue SA510 SSD, bought in September. It worked fine when installed but failed suddenly and catastrophically this evening after only about 4 months use in a WIn10 Dell laptop. It is not recognised by the BIOS and is not recognised when inserted into a USB adaptor on another PC. Luckily I still had the original (spindle) HDD and have put this back in. It’s horrendously slow but at least it’s got me running again.
This is the most appalling reliability I’ve ever seen in a drive. At least with spindle HDDs there is some warning that a drive is about to fail. With this - nothing. Just dead.
It will need replacing under warranty, but first I want to find out if there is ANYTHING that can be done to recover my lost files. I assume that with SSDs it’s Game Over?
BTW, I’ve spent the last couple of hours trying to raise a support ticket about this on WD’s system. It’s awful! I just can’t get the Submission to work. I’ve tried on two PCs with two different browsers. What a dreadful site.
Hi @Bassthang,
Have you opened a Support Case? If not opened, for more information, please contact the WD Technical Support team for the best assistance and troubleshooting:
https://support-en.wd.com/app/ask
Update:
(I forgot to add this info earlier, as I’ve been busy with other things.)
I had problems contacting WD support via the web site, but once I’d managed to get through the system and talk to a human being, their support staff were excellent. They arranged for the dead drive to be shipped back (WD provided the pre-filled shipping documentation. All I needed to do was package the item, print the documentation and take it to a local collection point.) They sent out a replacement drive in advance. That replacement is currently installed in the laptop that I’m using to write this.
I was offered an upgrade to a WD Red, but when it arrived it was a WD Blue again. WD realised that this was a mistake so they gave me the option of returning the drive and having a WD Red sent out. However, by then I’d set the drive up in the laptop and rebuilt the system on it, so I was reluctant to go through it all again. Therefore they extended the warranty cover by another year, which was welcome.
So far, the new drive is OK. I’m annoyed that I lost a couple of months-worth of family photos, some original digital art of mine and other important documents, but I’ve learned my lesson and I am making more frequent backups.
Add another WD Blue SSD (SATA type) to the list. After 6 months it is essentially DOA. Same as the problem above. Not recognized by the OS in any way. At the price of a 1 TB SSD now (under $60), it’s hard to justify spending more time on dealing with WD. I just ordered a new one NOT FROM WD!!!
Yes, the problem I have now is I just don’t trust the WD Blue SSD. It’s crazy that they are so unreliable, when I have ancient HDDs (well over a decade old) that are still going strong. It’s not just that SSDs fail; it’s that they fail so suddenly and catastrophically with no warning.
I’d ask you what brands of SSD you consider to be better, but I don’t suppose that WD would allow such comments on their forum. . .
While I was still considering having my dead SSD sent to a data recovery firm, I did some reading around the subject on some data recovery websites. One (local to me) firm posts case studies that are very informative. One such article described the typical failure mode of SSDs: basically the controller circuit goes into an error state for one reason or another and locks down the device. I take this to mean that the data is still there on the flash chips, but there’s no way to get at it. The recovery people solder connections to the device and reprogramme it. At least with traditional spindle HDDs there is often a good chance of the end user being able to recover the data, or at least be forewarned that it’s about to fail.
Lets talk more about customer service!
I started this Incident report more than a month ago- 230325-001792
To date NOTHING has been done about this failed ssd (WD SA510- 1TB). Like countless other drives, MANY of these ssd’s, it failed and couldn’t be recognized. WD’s response to it’s customers? A huge FU. Really? Way to bring the ■■■■ WD. You guys used to have some integrity and create a decent product. Now? Nope. I will never again purchase ANY WD product again. MAKE THIS RIGHT.
I have the exact same issue as Bass. Installed the Blue 510 back in Sept and used it for 3 months and then went on a 3 month winter vacation. Upon arriving home and booting my desktop it froze at the Windows logon screen saying it had encountered an error. Upon rebooting it came to a black screen with a blinking cursor as if there was no drive present. Reinstalled the old WD Velociraptor and was back up and running. Connected the SSD but it was not present in the bios. In Windows I started the imaging software Acronis True Image for Western Digital and it could not see the SSD either. Started an RMA case Reference #: 230407-001045 and am waiting. When I started a live agent chat to check the status of this claim I am pretty sure it was a robo chat as I could not get any info on the status of the claim. Kept telling me over and over that they are experiencing a service outage. Very disappointed after having used WD HDD’s in all the machines I have built over the years and never experiencing a failure!
I have the exact same issue with the SA510s - I own 34 of these that are defective and won’t work. I shipped all 34 back to WD at my own expense and they agreed to send me the WD Red as replacements. They shipped me back the same SA510 defective drives and now I’ve been waiting 3 weeks for a shipping label - this process has been going on for 2.5 months! Its seriously impacting my small business.
All I’ve heard is excuse after excuse from WD support - its horrible customer service. All they tell me to do is call back in 24-48 hours and my issue will be resolved. Apparently they think I have nothing to do all day except call them. CASE 230206-000141 in case anyone at WD actually reads these!
I’m not surprised. This is a joke. I just had a customer’s system come in for something else completely - but we had upgraded them to an SA510 500GB drive back in December 2022. Upon noticing it had an SA510 in it, I downloaded the WD Dashboard and updated the firmware immediately. That said, it shows that the drive has only 83% life left… This is an older customer that barely even uses the computer. These drives are absolute JUNK!
This is very worrying! I use my laptop a LOT, and Windows has a habit of writing to the HDD all the time, so now I’m worried that these things are just not suitable for use in anything other than a backup situation, and that the last one died simply because it has reached end of life in just a couple of months. If so, this is clearly completely unfit for purpose and the next time my SSD goes belly-up I’ll ask for it to be replaced with something else, as WD offered last time. Having said that, what IS reliable these days? Are there any WD SSDs that people have had good experience with? Or even non-WD drives?
At this point I think all WD drives are suspect - they have breached their customer’s trust and from my experience with customer support they really don’t care about us.
And to add insult to injury, it looks like WD had a data breach last month and our online account details (including partial credit card numbers) have been copied by scammers.
This just happened to my SA510 1TB and I have data that I need. Is there anyway that I can possibly get my data? I will say I normally buy samsung Drives but I wanted to look at some cheaper options. Guess that was my mistake. Gonna stick with Samsung Drives all the way now.
Data recovery companies can usually recover the data.
One company that I looked at (but didn’t use in the end - couldn’t afford it) has a great web site that gives case notes for various recovery jobs. These are well worth a read. They describe the failure modes (often the drive’s memory is OK but the interface has gone into a lockdown to “protect” the data).
https://www.dataclinic.co.uk/sandisk-ssd-data-recovery/
I figured that i would prob have to go to a data recovery service. I was hoping for some short term fix that would allow me to recover my data at the very least. Needless to say i will NEVER be buying another wd ssd ever again.
We have a lot of WD BLUE SSD (ex: WDS100T2B0A) that are great disks, being used for years.
We started buying the WD BLUE SA510… 90% of them have stopped working and we are just waiting for the others to stop working to have them RMA. We won’t ever buy this model again.
I couldn’t believe the topic of this thread. My WD Blue SA510 failed completely at approximately 4 months as well! I had it installed at a local laptop repair place and was dismayed that my $230 repair did not last longer. It did prompt me to go out of my comfort zone and to install a new SSD myself (first time). I purchased an external SSD casing and when I inserted the WD drive and plugged it into my computer, I received the following error message: “The last USB drive you connected to this computer malfunctioned, and Windows does not recognize it.” The drive is FUBAR. I will need to get a copy of my repair receipt so that I can initiate a claim with WD.
Same issue here… 2 WD SSD SA510, failed within a couple of weeks.
One got replaced, another one is sitting in processing state for over a month now.
I now seriously regret buying these SSDs
So sorry to hear. Western Digital used to be a reliable brand. I know it is off my list.
Mine just failed after 5 months. Never buying one of these ■■■■ drives again. My gaming rig is now completely dead. This is the second one that fails.
