Is 320 firmware buggy?

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http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/do-ssd-drives-really-fail-lot-t4035508.html http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/do-ssd-drives-really-fail-lot-t4035508.html

Be wary of the new Intel SSD 320 series. Currently, there's a bug in the

controller that can cause the device to revert to 8MB during a power failure. AFAIK they have not yet publicly announced it, and won't have a firmware fix ready for release until the end of July. We had an SSD 320 600GB 2.5" SATA drive in for evaluation from our Intel rep. I was able to kill it in two or three hours by power cycling it. Apparently (according to the Intel rep) when the power failure is happening, the SSD device tries to reconnect with the SATA port instead of initiating a proper shutdown. Something to do with interrupt priority being higher for reconnection rather than a proper shutdown.

I don't know how much truth is to this post. Has there been any official acknowledgement of this problem?

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Furthermore, why would a person be constantly power-cycling one of these devices? It's important to note the article says they're power-cycling the device (either hooking it up to a PSU with a manual switch, or are yanking the SATA power cable repetitively), which is very different from stand-by (DIPM).

If this is true -- a bug is a bug, no argument from me there, and it should be fixed. But the criteria for this happening seems a bit excessive.

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I suppose, but I upgraded to 320 because of built-in capacitors (I'm not using a laptop and I don't have a UPS). Kind of defeats the purpose if it can't shut itself down properly in the event of power failure.

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Goose wrote:

I suppose, but I upgraded to 320 because of built-in capacitors (I'm not using a laptop and I don't have a UPS). Kind of defeats the purpose if it can't shut itself down properly in the event of power failure.

That's not how I read the description of the problem at all. I read the description to mean that repetitive power-cycling of the SSD -- which I interpret as "continually powering the device on, then powering it off, then powering it on, then powering it off" -- resulted in the drive reporting a total capacity of 8MBytes.

The exact quote: "We had an SSD 320 600GB 2.5" SATA drive in for evaluation from our Intel rep. I was able to kill it in two or three hours by power cycling it."

"I was able to kill it in 2 or 3 hours by power cycling it", to me, means the guy sat around power-cycling it constantly for 2-3 hours. Let's say he did this for 2-3 hours at 10 second intervals. 3 * 60 * 60 = 10800 seconds. A power-cycle requires both the power-off and power-on cycle, so 20 seconds total. 10800 / 20 = 540 power cycles over the course of 3 hours.

This is what happens when people who write damning articles don't take the time to write verbosely what they were doing. Without those details, people have to speculate. I can point the world to a thouand different devices which will fail/freak out when continually power-cycled. How often are users power-cycling (again: NOT putting the device in stand-by/sleep mode (DIPM)! That isn't the same as a power-cycle) their SSDs? Are you power-cycling yours as often as this guy is?

Sigh.

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koitsu:

I know what you're trying to say, but the way the bug is described, it doesn't seem like one of those flaws that worsens every time you power cycle. i.e. the chances of failure remains the same, so basically I'm rolling a dice whenever there's power disruption (or reboot? does shutting it off and on count as a power cycle?). The guy in the post happened to have experienced it after 2-3 hours of power cycling, but if you're really unlucky you could potentially brick it the first time, which is what worries me.