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]

Hello,

My second SSD has died after about 2 and a half month running. ( First SSD died after a few days running)

And I confirmed the SSD showed 8MByte partition.

This time, I lost some data but that was not so many because I had found this thread

Anyway, I whish Intel released new firmware? as soon as possible.

[idata]

I really hope people will still raise their voices although intel has restricted posting here to signed up users only.. 😕

[idata]

With a corporation which monopolizes the market you should expect that, in the end it all boils down to sales and customer satisfaction, so we will have to wait and see.

[idata]

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?81321-Secure-Erase-With-bootable-CD-USB-Linux... http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?81321-Secure-Erase-With-bootable-CD-USB-Linux...

See the above link on how to use Power Magic linux live CD - i had 8MB bug hit me.

Here's what i did to get SSD back to life:

1. downloaded latest Parted Magic ISO from http://sourceforge.net/projects/partedmagic/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/partedmagic/
2. donwloaded http://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-as-1-2-3 http://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-as-1-2-3 to make USB key bootable Parted Magic Linux
3. run universal usb installer to create bootable USB key
4. boot from the USB key, full Linux start, go to start menu, choose Erase Disk i.e. follow the rest from the first ocz link above
5. i had to run it twice
6. there's an application (Disk Health, or something like that) on the Linux desktop in the top left corner. it recognized my SSD and i was able to see all the tech details, including restored 160GB capacity (mine is Intel 320 160GB - worked fine for a week before the bug).

good luck. report your experiences here so other can be more confident that this is a way to restore the SSD.

[idata]

forgot to mention how my Intel SSD 320 160Gb died with this bug: i put laptop (x201s) to sleep (it was running Windows 7 64bit and Linux dualboot, in the Windows at the time) and it never came back. Opening the lid, which normally wakes it up, resulted in constant HD light on and nothing going on for a while. Once i rebooted (press power buton to force shut down) it SSD was not recognized any more. I took SSD out, put it in SATA caddy, connected to another linux machine and got 8Mb device that could not be identified. This thread was instrumental in figuring out what's going on, and what ought to be done to try to bring the SSD back.