Amazon, SanDisk, Lenovo Defective on arrival, phone tag for over 20 hours Internet, Nationwide

It started out as buying a new SSD (solid state drive) for my Lenovo laptop as an upgrade from my traditional spinning hard drive. I turned to Amazon of course knowing their great prices and customer service, where I looked at tons of options, and decided on a SanDisk SSD with a 10 year warranty, now thats pretty awesome. Not to mention is was significantly less then most others with really good reviews. And of course trusting SanDisk from previous use with flash drives and SD cards, with absolutely zero problems. I think it was on sale too, not sure.

Now heres where it gets fun, I get the drive and I already have a dual bay 2.5 sata drive dock with 2 slots, which is able to clone. Yay! Should be easy except you can not clone a say 500gb drive to your new 480gb drive. If I had known this, I would have kept looking, so I did some searching on google and found some clone software and used my old lame slow desktop computer to do it. 

Cool now I have all my info on my new drive. Hook it up and turn it on. First thing that pops up, something along the line of “Lenovo, repairing disk.” Crap! Startup takes forever but it works! Not sure what happens but awesome.

I start messing around with it, checking to see if all my files are there and try a game or 2, all working and I can even tell, its a lot faster, This is awesome. Then all a sudden, it freezes… but my mouse curser still moves around and, ok this is weird, then it starts working again and does everything I had just done for the past minute, weird?

This keeps happening, and it seems to be happening more and more often now. Ok somethings wrong. Maybe every 30 minutes it “freezes” for, yes, exactly 1 minute. Ok, let me restart, maybe its just a glitch. Restarting………. ok this is taking forever, longer then it did with my other drive. This isn't right (I later timed how long, 4 minutes and 52 seconds, every time). 

I shut it down and take it out, and go to a working computer, hook it up externally and test it, it passes everything, but it fails the SMART test. Contacts Amazon immediately, they tell me that they're sorry I got a defective product, but with their experience, that I should contact the manufacturer (SanDisk) and that almost always that they can fix any problem I'm having, alright thank you. This was through chat I believe. 

I email SanDisk and tell them everything thats going on, during non operating hours, so they'll call me back soon. I get a call 2 days later I believe and an Indian man asks me what all is going on (he was very hard to understand). So I tell him everything about it and he proceeds to ask how I cloned the drive, which I did and he says, well thats your problem, you didn't use our recommended (and ONLY acceptable software out there) and so we cant help you because of that. This is where I get mad. No, you sent me a defective drive. End of story. It doesn't matter what files I put on there, if SMART wasn't working, it wasn't working in the first place and thats not my fault. He wouldn't help me, so after who knows how long I decided to give up and call Amazon back, which I did.

I talk to someone and of course have to explain everything, but they can see the chat history at least. Im on the phone for at least an hour now with Amazon. Since SanDisk was very rude, Amazon decided to exchange the drive for me, for free since it was defective (thank God), but only 1 problem, now my personal information is on that SSD, and you can never truly delete everything off of them, so I make that known to them, plus I cant send the old one back in with my info on it before the new one comes, because then Id lose all my stuff! The gentleman was very nice and went ahead and sent me the new one, with 30 days to send the defective one in, sweet.

2 days later it comes in the mail, so now I use my HDD bay to clone them (since they're both 480s) and pop it in my pc. Same thing. Crap. I call SanDisk again, same guy. Oh yea I remember you. He emails me a 10 or so step process to wipe the drive or something, so I go and do that through the DOS system, doesn't work. Take the drive out and do it through another computer, doesn't work. Its still having the same problem. Call SanDisk again, its not working! He says he cant do anything for me. Ok this isn't going anywhere so we come up with calling the manufacturer of the computer (Lenovo) to see if they can do anything. 

I call Lenovo, and they wont do anything since my laptop is out of its 1 year warranty, and of course, no OS cds and nothing to reset it, but there is a way within the computer. Ok Ill try that. That has 3 options, Reset and Wipe, Repair, Recover. All 3 do not work, because there is a “file” missing. How? Its all there… Call Lenovo back, oh I'm sorry sir, but we cant help you with that, BUT, you can buy our service and we can send you a windows 8 cd and bios disk so you can reset it, as well as protection for 5 other non apple devices for $200.00 a year, how will you be paying for that sir? No I'm not paying. But sir, NO thank you. Great that didn't help. 

I call SanDisk back, Im furious now. Let me speak to a manager right off the bat. I tell him everything, including that this is not Amazons fault, they received a new defective product from SanDisk and sold it to me not knowing, and SanDisk should be the one fixing it, plus it has a 10 year warranty. At this point they're still trying to blame it on me using 3rd party cloning software, except SanDisk doesn't say anywhere on what software to use, I had to ask after the fact, but nevertheless, I made my point that it was unprovable that it wasn’t SanDisks fault and they agreed to send me a replacement disk if I sent the defective one to them and not Amazon. Fine, Ill do that, I just want my computer back. It keeps getting worse. He tells me to do the 10 step whatever process again. But before they send me the disk they want a non-refundable $20 for sending the disk out before I send the defective one in. This is where I lose it. You want me to pay out of pocket, for a defective product, that you tried to blame on me and did absolutely everything to get out of helping me at all and blamed amazon and expected them to fix your problem, are you crazy?! No, I'm absolutely not paying it. Ok sir, we will make a one time exception and send it out free of charge. 

At this point, I'm just mad. Ive been on the phone for over 15 hours over 2 weeks and nothing has been accomplished. SanDisk wont help to remedy the problem but also didn't make it known to use specific software, wont help to “reset” my computer and wont take responsibility for anything. The new disk arrives, and first thing, I test it, it works cool. So far its blank, I haven't touched it. Including paying for an OS disk or repair shop. Also, I won a certified windows 7 disk and code, but 7 isn't an upgrade from 8 so I cant install it. I also can't wipe it, repair it, reset it, go back. It wont let me do anything. 

Ive asked many computer engineers, software engineers, they all have ideas, but none work and all of them have never heard of this before. So here sits my $1500. paperweight, with my defective drive with personal data on it, my other drive with my data and my new replacement drive. I never sent it back in, because they didn't fix the problem. Basically my brother who's a computer engineer said the whole thing is f****d now, and they haven't contacted me at all for any of it. Im extremely disappointed with all 3 trusted known companies who honestly didn't give a d**n, although Amazon really did try to help, and they were the ones least at fault here. 

This happened back in August of 2015, and here 6+ months have gone by, I still don't have a working computer, and they haven't even tried contacting me about not getting the drive back, or actually fixing the problem. 

I have everything I could get documented, but phone calls. Just the logs and numbers of each phone call. At this point, its so many details I cant remember everything, but that is the main, not all the details to my absolute best memory. Too many hours were spent on the phone for nothing. Now I have 3 drives that I cant use, and my laptop doesn't work. 

SanDisk gave horrid customer support, Lenovo gave less then adequate support, but you can always buy more, of course, and Amazon was left to pick up the slack. Unacceptable service from well known and trusted companies. 

If anything, when buying SSDs, go with a little bit more expensive ones, like Samsung Evo, etc and pay that little bit more, they better perform and have less of a failure rate. And probably better customer service for that matter. Anything is probably better then SanDisk, which sucks because I really liked them and their products. 

It would be nice to have my computer back. Any working order is better then nothing even if its not the upgrade I was trying to get, and the disk cost $159.99 plus tax. It BTW, was “SanDisk Extreme PRO 480GB SATA 6.0Gb/s 2.5-Inch 7mm Height Solid State Drive (SSD) with 10-Year Warranty- SDSSDXPS-480G-G25” and is now selling for $180+ but also with more information provided and “Concierge Service” from SanDisk for only $40. But they still wont fix my problem. 

Thanks for reading and hope this might helps someone else from getting screwed over.