Hi HN,

I wanted to send out a PSA about a terrible product: the SanDisk Extreme external SSD.

I bought one a couple of years back, which one day simply stopped mounting to any computer I had. I sent it to a recovery service but they couldn't find the problem either but they kept it with them.

After a while they discovered that the drive has a heat sink issue where the components are not sufficiently cooled and start to malfunction. They said it was a common problem they have noticed with these drives. They were able to recover my data but of course it costs a lot. For me the cost of recovery was worth it but it does not make sense to pay 10x the cost of the drive to extract data that it loses.

Don't buy this drive. If you already have one, back it up to some other media and don't store anything of value on it.

And of course, always have two copies of your data at the very least.