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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did you lose your data when restoring the drive?

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yes, of course. it's a total erase. i doubt there's a way to restore SSD while keeping data.

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Hello to other fellows in misery, here are my 3 cents. I'd been using Intel 320 300GB drive as a system disk for month and a half with no issues whatsoever. It suddenly reduced itself to 8MB without any warning signs, just as in other cases described. If you want to restore the capacity, I soundly advise you to choose Parted Magic for it, and not HDDerase or GParted; Parted Magic is at least the only one that did work for me. It needs to be done the way descibed on OCZ forum linked above by User85; let's shorten it: http://goo.gl/33y1M http://goo.gl/33y1M (btw OCZ is another manufacturer who deserves to be pointed out for its lousy practises - see http://goo.gl/JFxRs http://goo.gl/JFxRs). I myself burned the iso on a cd-rw.

A couple of points to note. Parted Magic will ask you whether to proceed with enhanced secure erase rather than with standard secure erase, I suggest you to go with the standard erase; enhanced erase, as far as my knowledge goes anyway, is wearing out the drive more (again, that is just my knowledge). Second, in my case 8MB was still being shown after the erase, I had to re-run Parted Magic to have it listed correctly and be sure it worked. Last thing is that on Parted Magic's website I saw it's creator's request for donations as he and his wife are having a hard time maintaining their tropical fish business ;). For me personally it was a pleasure to donate, that fellow's work has made my drive usable again, if his OS worked for you as well, then you might consider doing that too.

I never use system drives for storing data, so I wasn't hit *that* hard, but I can only imagine how folks who've lost some larger share of their stuff are feeling. Yeah, we should back up on a regular basis, as Intel has been preaching us recently, but damn - these SSDs were supposed to be a large step forward in terms of reliability, weren't they - especially with the prices that we paid!

As for me, I just put my old hard drive into the laptop, re-installed the OS and moved on. I am definitely disappointed with Intel, some time ago there were these X-25 failures and firmware issues, then recently the Sandy Bridge chipset scandal, with people being instructed to return their laptops, and now this sorry crap. As my last word, I especially want to warn all 320 users who haven't experienced anything bad so far, that there is a probability some of them are sitting on ticking time bombs, please do not stick to that 'it won't happen to me' mindset and either backup regularily or put the drive aside at least for as long as Intel releases firmware update. Cheers and take care!

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Thanks for the information Hermit. I think I will download a copy of Parted Magic, just in case.

I wonder if this is a hardware error that a firmware update will fix / compensate for, or it is just flawed firmware?

Matt

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http://communities.intel.com/message/135752# 135752 http://communities.intel.com/message/135752# 135752