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]

I'm wrong that Intel is handling this badly?

Or wrong that it is foolish to operate a business that would be devastated by data loss, without any backups and without any RAID?

[idata]

Well, yes and no. I naturally expect quality from Intel products, but no producer is error-free, especially when it comes to v1.0 products. And Intel is no exception to that, it's just less likely to happen with them (remember the Pentium FDIV bug?). So putting this to a vital production system is risky. A responsible engineer does not put something that's available for 3 months into a production system at all.

[idata]

What I find worrying is that the 320 series uses the same controller as the X25-M G2 series. The main difference with the 320 G3 series is that they went to 25 nm flash chips, and also added backup capacitors, disk encryption and NAND redundancy. But the firmware should have been largely debugged. So I am wondering too why they didn't catch it in testing, especially since it seems to be related to the backup power techinique that they should have concentrated their testing on. And they took long enough to get it to market.

But I know that no product, especially an SSD is perfect at launch, which is why I am still using a spinning magnetic drive.

[idata]

Yes they are buggy. I bought two drives and both went bad.

The Intel SSD 320 Series 80GB serial number CVPR116301S008OBGN BATCH CNCV14P108 PACK DATE 4/26/2011 It ran for 9 days, went blue screen and then 8mb.

The Intel SSd320 Series 120GB serial number CVPR1160060M120LGN BATCH CNCV140108 PACK DATE 4/24/2011. It ran for 7 days, before it would power on and off irratically and finally no data when it would power on for a few seconds.

I cloned and have backups but my worry is that I can't erase confidential data. So how do you make sure if I return it that the data can't be restored?

Any thoughts?

[idata]

If you are nothing to loose then you can try secure erase.

/message/133042# 133042 http://communities.intel.com/message/133042# 133042

I am sure that you don't need any other methods to erase the drive, it would be safe enough, because MLC does not have memory effects like magnetic media, AFAIK