SanDisk Extreme Drives Stopped Working

UPDATE:

I tested all of my flash drives in all three PCs.

  • All of the USB 2.0 drives (regardless of brand) work in all of the PC’s, both in USB 3.0 ports and 2.0 ports.

  • All of my USB 3.0 Docking stations (Orico) work in all of the USB 3.0 ports.

  • 2 of my SanDisk Ultrafit USB 3.0 drives work in all of the USB 3.0 ports on all of the PC’s. One of these has seen occasional use, the other was brand-new, fresh out of the package. The third drive fails in all ports.

  • NONE of my Extreme Flash drives (two 32 GB and one 64 GB) work in ANY of the USB 3.0 ports on ANY of the PCs. One of them works in the 2.0 ports, but cleaning, reinitializing and reformatting did not succeed in making it USB 3.0 compatible.

  • I have two Extreme card reader dongles for my SD cards. One of them is old and the shell had cracked open. I bought a new one a few days ago to replace it. The OLD one still works in all USB 3.0 ports. The new one (right out of the package) doesn’t work in any of the 3.0 ports.

  • I have the latest BIOS and Chipset drivers in all three PCs, installed prior to the problem. The failed drives do not appear as available in the BIOS setup (no surprise there).

The failure of the drives was signaled by no activity as far as I can tell. I transferred a few large HD video files (10 GB+) from one PC to another successfully on my 64GB drive. A few hours later I tried to do the same action and it wasn’t recognized by either the source PC nor the target PC. I then tried all of my Extreme drives and non of them worked.

As I noted in my original message, this problem defies logic. It’s like a neutron bomb exploded and targeted only SanDisk 3.0 drives.

I’ve been working with computers for 25 years and have seen plenty of strange things, but this is right up there with the strangest.

Any useful suggestions are appreciated.