I've been keeping watch on Crucial (and by extension, Micron) after the company began refusing to honor lifetime RAM warranties. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the same thing is now happening to customers with dead SSDs.
Reddit user AssignmentGlass5591 recently created a thread explaining that their Crucial X10 Pro 4TB external SSD decided to die at just 1% of its advertised lifespan. "It didn't wear out. It just broke," they explain.
The failure came with critical warnings in Crucial's app that were bad enough to warrant a replacement. AssignmentGlass5591 went through the normal channels required when this sort of thing happens.
They completed the Return Merchandise Authorization (RMA) process with Crucial and paid to ship the SSD to the required warehouse, expecting a replacement.
Crucial now claims Micron "stopped making M.2 NVMe SSDs" to dodge warranties. Micron is a top-3 NAND manufacturer. I have it in writing, and their own app confirms my SSD is dead.from r/pcmasterrace
Here's where the AI boom stepped in to ruin another day. Crucial sent a reply email stating that there's no replacement available for the X10 Pro 4TB SSD because "consumer business is closed."
Instead, the company said it would refund the SSD's price at the time it was purchased, which was about €230. That's not good enough. Looking at Amazon.de this morning, that same drive now costs about €500.
AssignmentGlass5591 asked Crucial to replace the faulty external SSD with an internal SSD. Any M.2 SSD would do. But that didn't work either. Here's Crucial's official response (translated from German) from the email that the Reddit user received.
Due to Crucial's closure, production of all components, including portable SSDs, M.2 NVMe SSDs, etc., has ceased. Consequently, our inventory is depleted. Therefore, our only option is to refund your purchase price.
Dilshad, Micron Commercial Products Group
As a reminder, Micron announced the end of its Crucial lineup of consumer products in December 2025.
After building up 30 years of brand loyalty, Micron decided to completely forget about consumer markets in order to focus entirely on AI customers buying massive quantities of memory and storage for data centers.
This move came with a promise to fulfill any warranty obligations, but obviously the company is doing the bare minimum.
Crucial recently pulled the same warranty trick with RAM
As I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, Micron/Crucial was called out a couple of weeks ago for botching a customer's RAM warranty.
Tom's Hardware covered the story, in which another Redditor explained that they were offered just 17% of the market value for a 48GB DDR5 kit that had gone bad and needed to be RMA'd.
Crucial/Micron is refusing lifetime warranties after closing consumer ops—offering 17% of market value and keeping working hardwarefrom r/pcmasterrace
Rather than receiving roughly $1,400, the price of the kit today, the customer was offered just $241.86. Good luck buying a replacement DDR5 kit for that price. The worst part? Only one stick in the kit was faulty, but the entire thing had to be sent in for the RMA process.
It's not just Micron that's lowballing warranty paybacks
This isn't an issue isolated to Micron and Crucial. Tom's Hardware also reported just a few days ago that competing memory and storage giant SK hynix is also lowballing warranty claims and won't offer replacement hardware.
These companies aren't doing anything illegal; their warranty policies are rather ironclad. And under normal market conditions, receiving back the price you paid for the hardware wouldn't be an issue.
But that's no longer the reality of the market. These storage and memory companies are making unfathomable amounts of money on the AI buildout, and meanwhile consumer prices have never been higher due to shortages of components. The fact that some of that money earned from inflated AI pricing can't be paid back to customers just so they can buy any memory or storage at all is what I find particularly irksome.
Louis Rossman got into a legal battle with Samsung for a similar issue
Battling it out with a massive corporation isn't fun. But there's proof that high-profile pressure from customers can help the situation.
In June 2026, Right to Repair activist Louis Rossmann threatened to sue Samsung for not replacing a faulty 4TB 990 Pro SSD supposedly covered by warranty.
Samsung tried to send Rossmann a reimbursement for the purchase price of about $330. Meanwhile, the drive was selling for almost $1,000 on Samsung's website.
Rossmann threatened a lawsuit, and perhaps due to Rossmann's celebrity, Samsung folded. It promised to pay out the current market value for the faulty 990 Pro SSD, allowing Rossmann to buy a replacement without losing any money.
Better yet, it said that any customers in Rossmann's situation would also receive full (and current) market value for faulty hardware.
Windows Central's take
It's becoming clear that memory companies making fortunes off of the AI boom will continue to try to milk everything possible out of regular consumers.
It's also becoming clear that, with enough pushback, we might be able to change the way they're handling warranty claims as markets continue to experience chaos.
I expect this type of shenanigan to continue as more drives fail and replacements become more scarce, so keep making your issues public.
If you are buying a drive, I recommend checking out third-party retailers first. They might have a separate type of replacement or return option in place that works around manufacturer warranties. Nothing is guaranteed, but layers of support can't be a bad thing.
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