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 installed the new RMA 120G Intel sent me in my netbook, after the system came back from sleep / hybernation I had to reboot because it was frozen, on the boot screen I got "boot mgr not found" put the old 150G HDD ran Intel toolbox with the SSD drive connected to the USB adapter and sure enough it was dead with 8m and BAD_CTX

What can I say, I am overwelmed, these SSD drives are a thing of beauty, they are more of a headache then any other PC problem I have come across.

They are a sad story indeed.

[idata]

maeh, this sucks. I received my RMA replacement today but I am reluctant putting it back into my macbook pro since other users reported the replacement drives failing as well. Guess I will wait til intel issues a "real" fix or firmware upgrade since i need my macbook for work..

[idata]

I purchased the 160G 320 intel SSD for my main office computer so that it would boot faster and offer more stability. As of this writing I have not installed this drive because and was planning to this weekend. Now after reading this I feel very uncomfortable installing this into my main machine. I am a small business and losing data would be devastating to this business.

Intel should take some responsibility for this problem. For many years I have relied on the stability of intel products to keep my business humming. Now that same company continues to push out a known defective product without any news or information about fixing the problem.

Guess I have another piece of usless computer hardware sitting on the shelf collecting dust.

This is so irresponsible of a manufacturer to put out a product with such a high failure rate and to find out that the failure is devastating and unrecoverable.

Steve

[idata]

If losing the data on your SSD would be devastating to your business, then you are doing something wrong. If the data is that important, you should have multiple backups and a RAID to minimize downtime.

I agree that Intel has handled this badly, but it sounds like you have even worse problems with your business IT setup than faulty Intel SSDs.

[idata]

You're wrong and here is why, when people buy from Intel is not the same as buying from a fly-by-night company they depend on the firm's reputation most of all.

Naturally having backups regularly is essential, BUT if you have to treat Intel drives the same way you would treat a john doe drive defeats the whole purpose.

And that is the essense of this whole thread...Intel's self defeating irresponsible releasing of the buggy SSD drives.