I’m sorry to hear about the issues you’ve experienced with your drive.
If you’re facing a situation where your gaming rig is no longer functioning due to the failed drive, here are a few steps you can take:
Test the drive on another system: If possible, try connecting the WD Blue SA510 drive to another computer to see if it is recognized and functions properly. This will help determine if the drive itself is the problem or if there may be other issues with your gaming rig.
Contact WD Support: If the drive still doesn’t work or is not recognized on another system, it’s recommended to reach out to Western Digital (WD) customer support. They may be able to provide troubleshooting assistance or advise on warranty options.
Consider data recovery: If the drive contains important data that you need, you may want to consider a professional data recovery software. Try Stellar data Recovery. They can assess the situation and attempt to retrieve the data from the failed drive.
Regarding your decision not to purchase WD drives in the future, it’s understandable that you may be frustrated due to multiple failures. However, it’s worth noting that hard drive failures can occur with any brand. It might be beneficial to explore other reliable brands and read customer reviews before making your next purchase.
Remember, while electronic devices can sometimes fail, it’s important to properly back up your data to avoid significant data loss in such situations.
I generally agree with your statement that “drive failures can occur with any brand”, but there are few things which made us (customers) come back to WD and not to “any brand” (e.g. reliability, performance and price)
If you had a bad batch of drives, ok - stuff happens in life, admit it, replace and move on. But when replacements aren’t available and apart from promises to get back within a day or two, absolutely nothing is being done - this is where i think you are hurting the brand.
I am pretty sure, that frustration of the majority here is not due to multiple failures, but rather time it takes to issue a replacement.
After just forgetting about my failed WD Blue SA510 for a couple months, because I was so angry!
I thought maybe I’d give WD a chance to fix their support system. Nope. 20 minutes on hold, I gave up.
BUT, I think I beat their system! On a Saturday afternoon, I did a chat with a live agent. Yes, live. Of course she (definite female name, at least…) was multiplexing between a bunch of chats, as normal. A bit of patience paid off, after getting her all the data she needed, telling her the failure modes, etc., she fixed me up with the RMA, including a WD paid for UPS shipping label. So maybe there is hope for their system, for those who haven’t got an RMA yet. Do a chat on a weekend! I’m hoping it won’t be too long for a new one, but it will only be a backup now anyway, since I had already bought a Samsung SSD.
I am wondering if WD has any explanation for this mess.
I have lost time, customers’ data and confidence, and energy replacing these broken drives.
I am in touch with a class action lawyer. They need to be responsible for their creepy products.
Another user here that after 4 months have a bricked WD Blue SA510… Stop working and keeps the pc re-starting. On external W10 desktop freezes everything even the explorer… Cannot format nor partion it. Ubuntu message: DISK IS LIKELY TO FAIL SOON. Disappointed!
Made an account just to add on to the pile. I bought 2 SA510s and one of them has failed in the span of a few months without warning. After reading the support request horror stories, I don’t intend to update the other one, I just bought two from a different manufacturer to replace both right away. Bye bye WD, this is how you lose a loyal long-time customer.
Are you able to say here which brand and type of SSD you’ve opted for?
I’m keen to find a source of reliable drives, and all I see on the web are complaints about how all drives seem to be poorly-made these days. Surely SOMEONE is making reliable drives? What to the server farms use? (Probably huge spindle-based drives!)
The Blue SA510’s are a complete engineering failure on WD’s side - and what I find most frustrating is that they haven’t done a complete recall of them or acknowledged the fact.
Couple this with the abysmal customer service (I’ve been attempting to return and replace mine for 7 months now.) WD has outsourced their customer service to someone called “Teleplan Service Logistics” and everytime I talk to them its another “can you give me this” and “can you send us that” issue. Then after I do compile pictures, S/Ns, packing lists and get an RMA number and a month later they replace them they send me the wrong drives, which then starts the entire process all over again.
DO NOT DISCUSS COMPETITOR PRODUCTS HERE. This is everything their legal department needs in order to label this topic a smear campaign by bots. If you want to buy products from the competition, do your own research.
I will reiterate: WD has tarnished one of the proudest names in storage history with labelling this SA510 garbage as WD Blue. WD Brown would have been a more appropriate name.
At this point I have two SA510 drives (one lightly used and dead, one barely used and currently still alive) that are waiting for the entire product line to be recalled. WD has my permission to contact me directly in order to replace these drives with two comparable drives from a different product line. I will not initiate an RMA as I do not want a replacement SA510 for the dead drive and I’m too late to request a refund from the retailer for the live drive.
Hi there! I am of yours! Just after 5 months my WD Blue 1TB stops working loosing all my data! Data recovery companies are asking me about 1k of dollars and WD is not providing me any assistance.
Did you find any way to get data back from the SSD?
Their legal department may have more things to worry about if we all start to sue WD. . .
I will say though that my replacement WD Blue is still going strong, several months after installing it.
(I can’t believe I just wrote that! I have spindle-based HDDs that are DECADES old, used frequently and still working perfectly! Call this progress?)
It is not acceptable that millions of users lost their data and a company as WD does not provide any information on how to recovery devices affected by a so huge defect!
As I am understanding this is an issue appeared from about one year and no recovery actions have been performed.
WD BLUE SA510
Purchased Aug 19, 2022, failed July 31, 2023 (or thereabouts).
The Windows 10 desktop it was installed in became unresponsive after shutdown (software shutdown). Was unable to run chkdsk on it via Windows 10 install disk. Pulled the drive and after much experimentation was able to copy off my data to another drive using a Linux computer. Afterwards I was unable to reinitialize it using Mac Disk Utility or Disk Management in Windows 10. Am now using MiniTool Partition Wizard Pro to wipe the drive, which appears to be working, albeit very slowly. I’ll have to wait and see if it’s able to complete, and then try reinitializing it again. After all this I don’t think I can trust this drive again as anything more than a backup disk. Hopefully WD will offer to replace it.
my wd blue sa510 1TB is failed also after 4 month of usage. after that i decided not to buy wd ssd products because i loose my data so what is my guarantee to buy another wd product?
+1 for WD SA510 1TB failure after 9 months of almost no usage (under 1GB of data on drive). Support wasted 40 minutes of my time and just referred me to an RMA page where I get to request an RMA AND I get to pay for shipping, only to get another SA510 that will probably fail. Forget that. No more WD or Sandisk products for me. Not worth my time for a $40 drive.
When mine failed last year, the support team arranged for me to send it back to them at no cost to myself. So while I lost a lot of important data (including photos of my partner, who has since died), I was happy with their support. So far, my replacement drive is still working, but I’m taking no chances with my data, which is regularly backed-up to a mechanical HDD.
They obviously have a serious issue with these drives, so they should be bending over backwards to keep the customers happy, not fobbing them off. All companies have problems from time to time, but it’s how they deal with those problems that shows which are the good organisations. Sadly, this practice of putting up barriers to communication is endemic in modern business. It’s often very hard to find a way to contact a human being -you find yourself going round and round in circles on a web site without finding a phone number or email address. You often have to jump through the hoops of those annoying FAQ pages or AI chatbots (when have they EVER taken us to the right solution?) before finally being given the opportunity to glimpse a support email address. This is because it’s cheaper to have a tiny workforce and rely on the technology to service most of the customers’ needs, and when this doesn’t work their bean-counters have probably worked out that it’s more cost-effective to lose some customers than to invest in more support.
WD’s spindle drives have always been some of the best out there but I wonder if they have sub-contracted the manufacture of some or all of their SSDs, and now they’re paying the price for choosing an unreliable supplier. They should have issued a general recall in this case. Even though I’m happy with the support I was given, the huge wave of reports of poor products and even poorer support has put me right off risking my data to WD SSDs again. I’m now in the market for some more storage, but I’ll try out other manufacturers’ products this time.
Hello, I work for a small computer shop. We have sold a ton of SA510 over the last year.
This year has been a joke for WD. I am tired of telling customers that there data is gone!
Dead. No second chance. I have paid $600 to a data recovery specialist to which they have
had custom programming made for this issue. Still no data recovered.
If you have a SSD please make a “BARE BONE RECOVERY”. “DISASTER RECOVERY”
Buy a cheap external SSD and use Macrium Reflect free to make an image.
Has anyone found a Data recovery Service that is able to successfully pull data from these failed SA510 SSDs? Would still like to get my data if possible.
My replacement 1TB WD Blue is still OK in my laptop after over 7 months. However, after reading dozens of comments here about the appalling reliability of these drives (and the fact that it is apparently impossible to recover data - something that was usually possible with spindle drives), I have now ordered another 1TB SSD from a well-known memory/SSD manufacturer. Fingers crossed that this one is better made!
I intend to image my WD to the new one and swap them out. I have an old-fashioned spindle HDD that I use for Windows File Recovery backups. I could start using the WD Blue for that instead, but I don’t even trust it for that role. I’ll probably use the WD Blue for temporary file storage or as a 2nd backup. (I’d rather have 3 copies of something than none!)
What can WD do to try to regain customer confidence?
I’ve put together some action items that I would initiate if I were in charge at WD:
Take seriously those cases where drives have failed. Offer replacement drives without quibbling (preferably higher-spec drives - I was offered one but when it arrived it was another Blue. They gave me an extended warranty in lieu.)
Make it easy for the customers to get through to the support team and get these replacements without days of messing about on the website. Perhaps have a dedicated web page with a hot-link to a dedicated support team who are familiar with the issue. (Maybe they’ve already done this by now - I haven’t looked recently.)
If this was a car, the manufacturer would have issued a GENERAL RECALL by now. WD should consider this.
Investigate the causes of this major issue. Why are so many failing, so catastrophically? Is it a manufacturing fault with a single batch? Is it a design issue? Find it - and fix it! (My own hunch is that WD have “badged” cheaper drives made by some other company. Perhaps that other company made good products initially, but have since sub-contracted to yet another company that has cut corners or used counterfeit components.)
Keep the customers informed of any activity on this issue. For example, issue regular bulletins on the web site or via email. Let them know the findings and the proposed solutions. We also need to know which products ARE NOT affected by this issue. For example, are WD Reds and Blacks based on different hardware?
WD (or perhaps several SSD-manufacturing companies working together) need to design in some resilience, so that when a SSD fails in this way, there is a way that the data can be recovered - if not by the end user, then at least by data recovery companies. OR offer a free data recovery service in-house. Yes, this could be an expensive service to offer, but losing customers is more expensive!
Reading articles about SSD failures, it seems that the failure mode is a firmware-induced lockdown of the interface when an error is encountered, presumably to protect the data from further degradation. This seems completely pointless, as it locks the data away so that it cannot be recovered at all - even by most data recovery firms! What were they thinking?!
WD need to stop participating in the “race to the bottom”, churning out cheaper products in order to compete with other companies. WD has always been the “no-brainer” choice for top-spec hardware, especially drives for servers. For mission-critical data reliability and large storage requirements, SSDs just don’t cut it. When you save your data to the Cloud, you can be pretty sure that it’s sitting on some spindle-based multi-Terabyte HDDs, not SSDs. By all means, offer SSDs, but make sure they’re a cut above the rest: bomb-proof!
