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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I am disappointed in Intel about this. From that 'JW' post about the problem, dated May 17, it seems Intel has known about this random data loss issue for more than a month. A heads-up would have been nice: "Hey guys, we have recently become aware of a random data loss problem with Intel 320 SSDs and we are working on a fix. In the meantime, be sure to have your data backed up at all times and try to minimize power cycles."

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I've had two consecutive drives die with this problem. I'll have to call intel RMA tomorrow to ask for a refund. This is ridiculous. Stay away from this drive until Intel fixes it.

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Bach:

Can you give more information about what happened just before the drives failed with this "8MB bug"? Maybe it can help others to reduce the chances of having the same problem?

Were the drives powered off just before the failure? Was it a "safe" or "unsafe" shutdown? Were they in a computer that went to sleep or hibernation?

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Sure thing.

I use OSX and have the SSD in a 2010 Macbook Pro. The first time I had the device, I enabled the TRIM hack in snow leopard and was able to use the device for about 3 weeks. I usually just close the lid on the laptop and let it sleep when I don't use the machine and open it to resume when I do use it.

The second failure just happened last night and also manifested upon resume of the laptop from a sleep state and not a full power down.

Both times, when I open the lid of the laptop, the machine appears to resume but when I try to open an application, the machine freezes and becomes unresponsive. I get the dreaded eternal beach ball. I suppose that's the same as the windows hourglass.

I do a hard power down and upon boot up immediately following that, the device no longer mounts and booting into another hard drive I'm able to open disk utility and the SSD now shows with 8.4MB of space.

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Has anyone whose SSD has failed with the "8MB bug" been able to read the SMART attributes from the SSD? Either with Intel SSD toolbox, Crystal Disk Info, GSmartControl, or some other program?

Do the SMART attributes look normal, or are there some suspicious values?