For those who came in late, Western Digital is subject to a class action after its Extreme Pro drives started to go tits up.

Users suffered from sudden data loss and the company promised a firmware update to owners of the 4TB models. However, the 2TB and 3TB models also suffer from the same issue, and Western Digital did not promise any firmware updates.

Now Attingo managing director Markus Hafele said the problem lies in hardware, not firmware, which could explain the lack of corrective firmware updates for those models and SanDisk's continued silence about the source of the issues.

Attingo, which has been in the data recovery business for over 25 years, normally sees these failed SanDisk Extreme Pro SSDs at least once a week.

Hafele said that the components used in these SSDs are too big for the circuit board, causing weak connections (i.e., high impendence and high temperatures) and making them prone to breaking.

He also says that the soldering material used to attach these components is prone to forming bubbles and breaking easily.

It is not clear if the problem is cheap solder, the componentry, or both. Revisions of these SanDisk Extreme Pro SSDs seem to have been modified with extra epoxy resin to secure the oversized components. This suggests that Western Digital might know about the hardware problems.

However, these newer models are still failing, thus sending data recovery service customers to outfits like Attingo.