Western Digital is facing a class-action lawsuit that claims the company’s external SSDs can corrupt and wipe data stored on the devices.
Nathan Krum filed the lawsuit earlier this week in California. The legal action, first spotted by The Register, applies to the SanDisk Extreme Pro, Extreme Portable, and WD MyPassport SSD models.
According to the complaint, Krum bought a Western Digital SanDisk 2TB Extreme Pro SSD from Amazon in May for $179.99, but the drive ended up failing, turning it into a brick.
The lawsuit then cites numerous complaints online from other consumers who've reported the same problems, particularly with the Extreme Pro line. Indeed, a large number of user reviews on Western Digital’s own website also say the company’s portable drives can become unreadable once connected to a PC, rendering them useless.
The lawsuit adds: “Without warning these hard drives have wiped out data stored on them, making the files stored on them unable to be accessed and users unable or unwilling to use these drives out of the reasonable concern such data will be lost forever or cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars to recover,” the complaint says.
The lawsuit goes on to claim Western Digital has only supplied “an unreliable firmware update, or replacement devices that also have been reported to suffer from the same defect." That means affected customers have to settle for a replacement product they suspect is still faulty, or pay their own money to buy a new SSD, without any compensation from Western Digital.
The lawsuit is demanding the court force Western Digital to refund customers and pay damages to affected customers—at least $5 million to cover more than 100 buyers.
“What’s worse, Western Digital may be selling these defective hard drives at steep discounts to get them out of inventory rather than not selling them at all, knowing that these drives have a significant unremedied defect,” the lawsuit also claims.
In a statement, Western Digital said: "We do not comment on pending litigation."
In May, the company issued a firmware update for the affected drives, saying a bug can cause the products to “unexpectedly disconnect from a computer.”