SGT Appointed to Co-Lead SanDisk SSD Class Action

December 8, 2023

Silver Golub & Teitell LLP (“SGT”) partner Ian W. Sloss has been appointed by United States District Judge Rita F. Lin to serve as interim co-lead counsel (along with Bursor & Fisher P.A.’s Neal Deckant) to represent a putative class of purchasers of solid-state drives (SSDs) manufactured by defendants SanDisk LLC (“SanDisk”) and SanDisk’s parent company Western Digital Technologies, Inc. (“Western Digital”).

SGT and its co-counsel filed the first complaints against the SanDisk and Western Digital in August 2023 in United States District Court for the Northern District of California. The complaints allege that several SSD models designed, manufactured, and sold by SanDisk and Western Digital are defective. As a result of the design and manufacturing defects, the complaints allege, the SSDs frequently and suddenly become irreparably unreadable, causing purchasers to experience permanent data loss at alarming rates. Additionally, users who have not experienced data loss no longer consider the SSDs useable due to the clear risk of data loss.

At least ten actions in total were filed against defendants alleging damages arising out of the sale of defective SanDisk SSDs, and the actions were consolidated into a single action captioned In re SanDisk SSDs Litigation, No. 23-cv-04152-RFL (N.D. Cal.)(J. Lin).

Third party analysis of the SanDisk SSDs at issue confirmed that the SSDs are defectively designed and manufactured as alleged by SGT’s clients. Specifically, the analysis concluded that the components used by the defendants are physically too large for the circuit boards used in the SSDs which prevents the components from properly connecting to the circuit board heat pads. This in turn causes the SSDs to reach high temperatures during operation, causing the soldering material used to affix the components to crack, leading to the components losing their connection with the circuit board altogether, leading to permanent data loss.

In recognition of their expertise, knowledge, and leading role in developing and advancing the litigation to date, on December 4, 2023, United States District Judge for the Northern District of California Rita F. Lin appointed SGT partner Ian W. Sloss and Bursor & Fisher partner Neal F. Deckant as interim co-lead counsel for the putative class.