SSD power loss report updates

[Alan_F_Intel]

Intel is aware of the customer sightings on Intel SSD 320 Series. If you experience any issue with your Intel SSD, please contact your Intel representative or Intel customer support (via web: http://www.intel.com/ www.intel.com or phone: http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/support/contact/phone www.intel.com/p/en_US/support/contact/phone) . We will provide an update when we have more information.

Alan

Intel's NVM Solutions Group

[idata]

Alan,

Could you provide any indication on your progress on this issue?

Are you able to reproduce it?

If yes, have you been able to recover data from the drive?

Presuming the problem is fixable with a firmware update, do you have any estimates on when the new firmware might be released?

Any idea if it will be days, weeks or months?

Just trying to figure out if it makes sense to wait, or I should go out and get a new drive now.

I did write to customer support but have yet to hear back.

I experienced the problem while working on my computer - suddenly the programs started to freeze up, one by one.

Eventually the computer was completely unusable, I rebooted, but was then unable to get past the BIOS screen.

Connecting the SSD to another computer running Acronis True Image shows the drive now reports a size of 8 MB.

This is on a two months old 600 GB SSD 320 Series.

Model: SSDSA2CW600G3

ISN: CVPR11630357600FGN (have no idea what these numbers mean...)

SA: G17909-505

PBA: E75496-505

LBA: 1,172,123,568

WWN: 500151795954737A

FW: 0302

Best regards,

Carsten

[idata]

if you need your drive back soon, why dont you just RMA your drive ?

and you should include batch# so intel can track down the issue faster

as for version# ... it seems the SA you wrote on your post = version#

so if you rma the drive, request to exchange with different batch / newer version which maybe didnt effected with the bug

[idata]

slyphnier,

Appreciate the suggestion, but it is now Friday evening and I do need a working computer again by Monday morning, one way or the other.

That is why I would appreciate some sort of indication as to whether Intel expects it will take "days, weeks or months" to come up with a fix.

I also have some files on the drive that I'd like to recover, if possible.

Nothing essential, just data I would like to be able to restore if and when a fix is made available.

So, if Intel already knows that recovering data from drives suffering from this issue is going to be impossible, that would be useful information.

Then I could go ahead and do a secure erase now (as that seems to be one way of resurrecting the drive), and rebuild my working environment.

If on the other hand there is a chance that my data might still be intact I'd rather just get a new hard drive this weekend, and then later when Intel comes out with a firmware update retrieve the data from my old drive.

Likewise, if Intel has determined that it's a hardware issue, that would be another good reason to buy a new drive instead of erasing my current drive and likely run into the same problem again.

I guess this goes to say that I would appreciate any information Intel might be able to provide at this point, as it might help myself and others that are affected by this issue making a decision on how to proceed.

[idata]

MazaFaka! It is HPA problem! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_Protected_Area http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_Protected_Area No intel problem.

[idata]

How does that make it not intel's problem? If bios is issuing HPA commands (set max address etc) to the SSD and the SSD isn't complying properly, doesn't that make it intel's problem? Also... can you tell us how you determined that it's related to HPA? The only relevant link I found is: http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=679011 http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=679011

but all that indicates is that you can restore the size by removing HPA, which doesn't address the fact that it was erroneously created for some reason. If SSD alone is responsible for setting the wrong size, then it means this could happen with retail motherboard with no HPA features. (utilities like HDAT would then report it having HPA because afaik they only compare the native size and the reported size)