There are much better SSD options. I won't buy SanDisk since the Western Digital buyout. I only buy WD if it has a disk in it.
if people are silly enough to have 1 copy of important data, its their own fault, maybe be a learning exercise for them to backup.
Well, there is a snowball's chance in you-know-where I'll use a SanDisk or Western Digital MyPassport--and I don't forget they got ransomed recently either. My Western Digital Blue storage drive is still good after 5 years of 2-3 hours/month use. That's all the burden I'd put on an hdd nowadays. When that goes, I'll switch to a higher end sata ssd plus more cloud storage. Can't rely on one thing alone it seems.
I'm still running a pair of SanDisk Extreme Pro 480GB SSDs since 2014, back when they were actually SanDisk. One is used only occasionally now (though I hammered that one when I used it, mostly running development and testing environments in VMs), but the other is my data drive and apparently now has over 5.87TB in writes (according to HD Sentinel). I had one of them (I forget which) replaced years ago under the 10-year warranty, but otherwise they've been solid; and it didn't outright fail, I had just discovered read rates were degrading significantly and WD replaced it with another true SanDisk. I also still have a pair of 2TB WD Black drives that I bought in 2011, used them for development (in a RAID config), and now I use for alternating backups. Solid. I recently bought a 2TB WD Blue drive for drive imaging; I ran HD Sentinel's read test and saw several sectors with significantly poor read rates compared to the others, so I returned it to the store for an exchange, not knowing if it was actually a bad drive or if that was just "how it is" now. The replacement drive was just the same. It's sad to hear how WD quality has deteriorated in today's drives.
I think I read about this issue with SanDisk months ago, so that's why I stayed away from them. But WD's own SSD's should be safe to use, not? I guess this is true, cloud based back up is also another option. I currently use two external Samsung SSD's for local back up, problem is that I only make back ups once a month.
Their SSDs have never been a brand I would consider. They were always priced at least as high as anyone else's while being slower and less reliable. This is why I have dropped SanDisk. They are likely just rebranded WD drives now.
I always used WD for my HDDs. Even got a Velociraptor later because I never got a 10K RPM drive But for SSDs I went to Crucial because at the time they were one of 2 consumer brands offering power capacitors on their drives. After that all my SSDs were Crucial and always have good experiences with them.
WD refused to answer our questions about its self-wiping SanDisk SSDs / Months later, the company has nothing to say for itself.
I believe my desktop has an 8 year old WD SSD, never had a problem. In my laptop I have one from Samsung, it's 2 years old. I do know that Seagate had a bit of a bad reputation.
Obviously not all of them fail, but if I am spending my money I would go with the better odds. Seagate's reputation is based on mechanical drives and their tendency to insulate them for less noise which in turn makes them run hotter and have a higher incidence of failure. That said I would not buy their SSDs either. The memory companies tend to make better SSDs than the drive companies.
Perhaps I'm wrong about this, but I think I also read bad stuff about Seagate SSD's. But when I buy PC's, it's certainly something to look out for. Haven't had problems with Samsung and WD so far, both with internal and external SSD's. But that doesn't mean they will never fail of course. This list is quite interesting, any recommendations? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solid-state_drive_manufacturers
It could be perfectly fine but wouldn't be my first choice. With any of them make sure it is not your only copy of the data on it.
As xxJackxx says. Myself, I have a SanDisk Extreme PRO USB 3.2 Solid State Flash Drive 128 GB (SDCZ880-128G-G46) that works nicely, but generates a false positive Storage Device Health Monitoring prefailure warning. This was reported many times, also with earlier versions of the SanDisk Extreme PRO USB 3. (See my May 8 post.) As I said, it works nicely, but because of the false positive prefailure warning, I wouldn't recommend it.
I am late on this thread. I have had great service from my Samsung T7 series portable SSD's. They are USB 3.2 gen 2 and are pretty fast, but of course not like an nvme flavor setup! I have multiple backups but if I ever lost all the stuff on my T7's it would be the "hurt locker" for me.