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Is 320 firmware buggy?

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

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?

125 REPLIES 125

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

Intel is award of the problem and up to now no solution is available?

I spent money for my Intel SSD and in fact I got a faulty hardware. When I now receive another SSD 320, when will this unit fail?

For my opinion Intel should provide exchange to an SSD510 free of charge for all customer who have now an 8MB drive !!!

I also mentioned this on my rma because I don't want to get another buggy SSD320.

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

Intel is not so fast, reaction time is months and that's normal for such big company.

You need to use RMA if it's possible, nothing to do, as many times as neededб before you get the working drive or money back.

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

I am curious as to wheter this is happening to machines where ACHI is set instead of compatibility mode?

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

Hello, I am from Japan.

I encounrted the same problem in May (actually bought one in April)

The firmware was v1.7. And I remebered I set HDD password for the drive. I am not sure if I used AHCI or compatible mode, but I had tested both before I concluded that did not affect the R/W speed in my enviroment.

I had rebooted my machine serveral times for a few hours before I got blue screen and found the SSD had only serveral MByte partition, but I think the reboot was kind of usual ones which everyone must do when you install windows patches and some additional softwares.

I could not format and recover the SSD with Intel SSD Toolbox, so Intel suppor sent me new one.

After I got new SSD, the new SSD is working fine for 2 months. I set HDD password and rebooted several times during the installation for the new SSD. I think I did the same thing for new SSD because I thought this was just hardware error at that time.

I am scared because I found this thread...

It seesm I should take back up daily, just in case

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

1) AHCI vs. IDE/Enhanced or Compatibility/Emulation mode has nothing to do with the problem. I can absolutely 100% guarantee that. AHCI is the protocol used to communicate between the OS and the SATA controller, not the protocol used to communicate between the OS and the drive. ATA is the protocol used to communicate between the OS and the drive.

2) Regarding backups: people should be doing backups regardless if they're using an SSD or an MHDD. SSDs are not replacements for doing backups -- do backups regularly!