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]

Mine went from 8MB bug to working to bugged again. The first thing I did when it started working after being bugged was to use the Lenovo toolbox to run a system scan. One of the things it checks are the smart values. It said everything was fine. I did not look at the values myself. Now that the drive is back to the 8MB bugged state dead again, it is not recognized over USB 3.0 by the Intel SSD Toolbox or any other tools on my system.

Also, if I ask Windows to "initilize the drive" it stops reporting a size at all.

[idata]

The technology still has unresolved bugs in it that's why they are not releasing larger capacity drives, and sadly for us enthusiasts we went out and bought whatever Intel threw at us, and obviously they only care enough to RMA the drives knowing that that's not the real solution to the problems, but in the public's eye looks like they've done the right thing.

Keep your $$ and spend it when more solid drives are released and all this bull%$# @ is worked out.

[idata]

I used all these utilities, toolbox just doesn't work with my EVGA Nforce 780i all the options are grayed out and when I want to check a drive all it does is refresh the interface...go figure.

That crystal disk shows a bunch of values on the 80G drive but serial # is BAD_something, ...more Intel Bull@# $% and that's on the 120G and 80G drives I got, they went bad within 2-3 days.

[idata]

Well, I managed to recover my 120Gb G3 disk(but not data) after BAD_CTX 8Mb falure using regular Intel SSD toolbox, wich I've installed on old disk in different PC (i use laptop). First time I tried to make secure erase using it there was a message stating "power cycle your SSD while Toolbox is running". I thought WTF, is it safe? But I do it as requested, and after short process disk was found by system again with normal serial number and former capacity. I made a full format and run disk Toolkit SSD utilities, not a single problem.

It will be extremly helpful if INTEL respond and explain possible causes of all this, I can't live with the fact, that ALL my documents can suddenly dissapear, because I use INTEL SSD instead of GOOD ones. And I can't RMA it now, because it is considered fine by all tests.

Also, can it be hardware/integrated RAID problem? New ones from adaptec and AFAIK AMD LOVE to power off disks for "green" hype and can fool intel firmware somehow. Making disk react to power cycles is stupidest engineering idea ever.

[idata]

I figured it's during the power cycle some sort of voltage loss occurs and the drive gets scrambled, but I don't see how that can be our problem anyway, the bottomline is this, if you're lucky and the intel drive "likes" your system's configuration it will work for you, if not you will spend hours trying to make it work.

And it's not that they haven't figured it out yet, this technology was available for years even since WWII, it's just that it was not released to the public until these last 2-3 years...it's all politics trust me.