Is 320 firmware buggy?

[idata]

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?

[idata]

For example, you can find several people complaining in Amazon reviews of the 320...

[idata]

I'm confused. How is deleting all the data on a drive a solution for it failing to boot?

[idata]

I have had the same problem with the fellow a few posts above, I was installing a game on my 80G intel 320 and somehow everything froze up and couldn't do anything so I reset the system and before I knew it I kept getting the dreaded cannot find "bootmgr" on the main drive, so I switched to my old velociraptor 300g tried to revive the intel SSD but kept getting the BAD_CTX 8m reading on the crystaldiskinfo.

Someone mentioned about waiting the end of July but you see we are dealing with expensive equipment here, Intel should've thought ahead of time to prevent goof ups like this happenning before they even released the drives series 320, firmware bugs and all that is a lame excuse.

That drive cost me $199 and it's only one week old.

[idata]

Had the 8MB issue happen to me as well with my 160 GB 320. On Monday, I cloned the drive using the Intel Data Migration Software and installed the SSD in my new laptop. Monday night there was a software problem and I had to hold down the power button to cause the system to reboot. On reboot, drive was not recognized. Went though various procedures to try to get it to work. Nothing. Restarted the computer about 30-40 times. Eventually, the computer booted from the SSD. It ran fine for a while, and then I hibernated the computer. Took computer out of hibernation, drive not recognized.

After that I put in the original drive (a HDD) that laptop shipped with, machine booted right up. Attached the SSD to the laptop over USB 3.0 with the adapter the drive came with (Retail Box). Drive didn't show in "Computer". Right clicked on Computer --> Manage --> Disk Management. Drive shows as unformatted, no partition table, with an 8MB capacity. The original vendor is replacing the SSD, because I bought it less than 30 days ago.

I bought the 320 because of the proven track record of Intel SSDs. My machine supports SATA 6Gb/sec and I could have purchased a faster SSD. I choose the 320 because it is supposed to be more reliable. Dying within the first 24hours of use is not reliability. If the replacement unit fails quickly, I will need to get a refund and buy a different product. I understand taking time to fix an issue; however, it would be nice to know an issue exists so people who own the drives can take precautions.

[idata]

All,

Just as an FYI, I've provided an update on this topic here:

/thread/24121?tstart=0 http://communities.intel.com/thread/24121?tstart=0

Rgds,

Scott