Hmm. . . this isn’t quite what I had in mind!
I’ve just registered to share my experience with a 500GB SA510. After 5 months of light use as a secondary, non OS drive, and only 167GB written to NAND according to the last SMART report; the drive failed completely in just a few minutes after multiple I/O errors according to Windows Log Viewer. After restarting, the drive is unrecognizable in Windows, Linux etc… The shop where i bought the drive were authorized to give me a new SA510, but i refused, as I have 0 trust on these drives.
I think the entire line has a serious flawed hardware design problem, but of course is cheaper to replace them, instead of trying a massive recall.
I build systems for a living. The old Blue SATA m.2 SSDs with the blue boards were fine, but since the move to the green circuit board, every single one of my built systems have failed drives after a few months. It’s costing me a fortune to recall these systems to Quebec, from all over the USA and Canada to replace the drives (about $600 each). We have replaced about 7 so far, and I am afraid to use the remaining ten or so I have in a customer’s system, knowing they will likely fail. I’m now using Red drives and crossing my fingers all will be well.
Same story - way too many 3 to 6 month complete failures on this drive… WD used to be my go to - no longer the case, I’m sending my unopened ones back and sticking with Samsung. Very disappointed
I agree. WD Should acknowledge that there is a design flaw for these drives and recall them. I know a firmware update exists but was never made aware of this until it was already too late. I still would like to get my data if possible. Sadly I think its going to be too expensive.
Had the WD Blue SA510 a few months before suddenly it suddenly started failing and going into read-only mode. At least on Ubuntu (installed on it). In Windows 10 (installed on it), I just get blue screens. Whether this is due to the corruption this drive has caused to my installation or just the way Windows 10 reacts, is anyone’s guess.
I’m running the latest firmware and it clearly doesn’t address the issue. The painful thing is, my operating system seems usable for a while. But this drive can drop into read-only mode in 5 minutes or 5 hours, it seems completely random. BTW Does it even make sense for them to claim it fixes a problem where it drops into read-only mode, I thought that was the choice of O.S. when protecting itself from a failing drive, it certainly is in Linux.
They have wasted so much of my time over the last 3-4 weeks, as I struggled to understand the cause of the issue! I hesitated to just go out and buy a new SSD, it was new and I thought it was from a reliable company!
I share the opinion that there should have been a recall of this product. I’d of thought they’d want to do that just to protect their reputation.
At least you’re getting warning signs. I had no warnings; the SSD just died, instantly, with no hope of recovering data.
I recommend doing a backup immediately, then cloning your SSD to one from another, non-WD, supplier. My replacement WD Blue (supplied under warranty) has worked well since it arrived last autumn, but after reading posts here and articles elsewhere on the web, I have no confidence in it at all, so a few weeks ago I bought another 1TB SSD from another manufacturer and cloned my drive to it. There are some inexpensive SSDs available now, but many are from unknown Chinese suppliers, so I chose one from a well-known manufacturer whose memory products I’ve used for years. (I don’t want to mention the name here, in case the forum moderators remove this post but I’m sure you can work it out from the clues!)
I’m also making sure that any backups are made using a spindle-based drive. Yes, that’s slower, but it’s safer!
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I have three failed SA510 2 X 1TB and a 500GB all failed with
in 3-4 months after we installed!!! not good!!!
I just registered to report the same thing.
Bought two SA510s back in September of 2022. Used the computer until June 2023, then it was shut down for six months. One of the drives failed on the first bootup after the six months.
Adding insult to injury, the warranty check based on serial number tells me the drive is “out of region” and thus not eligible for replacement.
I bought the drives at Memory Express, which you’d think was a reputable retailer; did they sell me grey-market drives?
Personally, I only buy Crucial or Samsung SSD drives, but for those who are stuck with the WD SA510, it seems that Western Digital borked the firmware and issued a “critical” firmware update after it was too late.
WD Blue SA510 SATA SSD Critical Firmware Update
However, users are still reporting failures after the firmware update.
That’s totally unacceptable! You might expect that sort of behaviour with a mechanical drive (depending on where it was stored and how quickly it was brought to room temperature), but SSDs should be above all that.
My WD Blue is now sitting in a drawer. I’ve replaced it in the laptop with a Crucial for now. I’ll see how this goes.
I might use the WD as a File History backup, but after reading the comment about one failing after being unused for a few months, I’m not even sure about that! Someone I know once quoted this mantra about backups: “If it doesn’t exist in three places, it doesn’t exist”, so perhaps I’ll use it for a 2nd backup, with the primary backup being a mechanical drive.
Interesting that there is little or no comment in this forum from WD representatives. This is in itself a bad sign: it shows they don’t care. They should care though: there are many long-time WD customers on this thread who are about to go over to the competition and will probably never buy a WD product again. It takes a long time to build up a good reputation, but not long at all to destroy it. They need to come clean: tell us what went wrong (I still suspect it was a dodgy subcontractor) and what they’re going to do to stop it happening again. They should also offer a no-quibble replacement for any affected drives. Having a difficult or unfair returns system will only annoy customers more.
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I suggest a NAS box to backup you laptop using file history
I just had two go down. one last Oct that had all my photos for years and the other last week that had all my old graphics. All my other SSDs are Samsung etc. I had to use Disc drill to get the files from it. But still not sure if I lost anything. I had to rebuild all the folders, took days. I’m about to see what WD will do about it but Ive inform my Work Colleagues in the CGI entertainment business not to buy WD. I’m glad I wasn’t using a WD drive for a show.
Redundancy goes back to the 360K floppy. Backup important data. USB-C boxes for old SATA disks are cheap.
Just had to return another SA510/500GB drive to the supplier for replacement under warranty.
It wasn’t even being used as a system drive just a portable drive for temporary use when archiving stuff. It had only a few hours of use, no more than 80GB of data on it and had been sitting in a drawer for several months if not significantly more than a year. I plugged it in and attempted to transfer circa 100GB of data to it but it failed completely on the 2nd or 3rd large file with windows simply reporting a data transfer error and then not even seeing the drive at all thereafter.
Same old story, no longer being recognised by windows (or indeed anything else I’ve tried) in any way shape or form 
A maybe interesting thing though: I made a copy of the SMART data on receipt of this drive and, amongst other things …
Power On Hours: 0
Power Cycle Count: 390
Unexpected Power Loss Count: 382
… on a brand new drive delivered in a sealed box and being powered up by me for the very first time. An identical drive purchased a week or so previously and which had seen light use by me showed 0, 7 and 0 respectively. I very nearly requested an RMA at the time due to an apparently used/faulty product being supplied. This may or may not be in some way relevant to whatever the ‘real’ issue is with the appalling failure rate for these particular drives.
I’m expecting the replacement to arrive real soon once the supplier and courier have sorted their delivery issues out … but now I find that the latest version of SSD Dashboard will not work with these devices. As soon as an SA510 is plugged in, V4.1.2.4 just crashes. The previous version. V3.7.2.5 used to work fine other than the long term crazy issues with SDD Dashboard having a stupidly fixed window size and position so important stuff was often hidden under something else, like the task bar or other windows !
Unfortunately, I only have a copy of the on-line installer for V3 so when I try to reinstall it just installs V4 instead 
Does anyone know where I can get hold of the off-line installer for V3.7.2.5 so I can remove the blatantly bug-ridden latest version and reinstall a version that is actually known to work with these particular dubious quality drives ?
We have ordered multiple SATA SA510, with most of them failing until now. However, we have managed to access data on some of them using Linux and USB/SATA adapter. If you are lucky, maybe with this option you could save data stored on your SA510. If you are unfamiliar with that type of services and are living in EU, we can also try to get the data from it for you, feel free to contact at help @ notbadlab . com .
Some of the old blue series disks had poor AFR ratings
