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]

Well, here's how I see it. We all have our own opinions, and yours are as respected as mine as.

1) The issue is extremely isolated -- that is to say, the number of people experiencing the problem are a handful, compared to the number who have working/reliable drives. The people who have success stories don't appear on forums talking about their successes -- only the negative stories will appear here. We (those of us here on the forums) also have no idea how many people who experience the problem don't just call Intel Support and have the drive RMA'd. If I personally was experiencing the 8MB issue, I would be on the phone with Intel literally 2-3 times a week until I was able to speak to an actual engineer (not a service tech!) who could work with me to diagnose and debug the problem (e.g. me sending them the drive directly). I wouldn't be on a public forum expecting this to happen.

This does not mean "the problem doesn't exist" -- it means there's a handful of people experiencing it, they're rightfully upset about it, and they want to ensure that if they get a replacement that it too doesn't have the problem. That's completely understandable and justified; but no vendor can guarantee a product they give you won't be broken in some way. I can't tell you how many times I've done RMAs to get a replacement that had a completely different problem; I went through 4 (yes, four!) RMAs for graphics cards with EVGA at one point, until I learned my lesson and stopped buying their products.

2) Right now nobody (end-user-wise) knows what causes the problem, so that greatly limits how one can go about fixing it. It's difficult to fix something when you don't know what the problem is. This is why I said what I did in my previous post: it helps Intel engineers if you provide concise details of the issue to Technical Support and printed/written on paper when submitting the RMA, but now people who have "messed around" have to disclose exactly, with full verbose details, what they did. The less that's done between the time of failure and the time of RMA submission the better. And there are proper communication channels for all of this stuff -- for end-users it's Technical Support + RMA, for enterprise-grade products it's through your TAM (Technical Account Manager).

3) When a large number of RMAs start coming in for an issue and all the symptoms are the same, Technical Support folks start putting two and two together. They don't look at forums (at least not the majority), they look at tickets and what they're told to deal with per their managers. Eventually this trickles up the managerial chain until someone gets wind of it and has to measure just how serious it is. Yes, there really are people whose jobs are to do that. No idea if Intel has such people, but many other corporations do. I work for one who does, for example. 🙂

4) Could the "8MB problem" be more widespread than how I'm making it sound? Unlikely. Review sites and media outlets would have latched on and reported it en masse by now. Look what happened with the Intel Series 6 SATA bug; look at when it was discovered vs. when it started getting media attention vs. when it was fixed, and how much attention it got publicly. It doesn't change the fact that if you're one of the people who's suffering from the issue that it's infuriating. But do you know how many hardware flaws and silicon bugs I've found over the years in consumer and enterprise-grade products? Hundreds, and that's not an exaggeration. I'm not bragging in the least, I'm simply saying that products have bugs, and sometimes what companies do is "sweep the bugs under the rug" by RTM'ing a new product.

5) Keeping the publicity aspect in mind, what makes you think an Intel engineer is going lose his/her job coming to a public forum on his/her own behalf and stating "yeah the 8MB problem is confirmed"? The PR backlash from that would be astounding. And let's not forget what drives US businesses these days: stock value. Go look at stock ticker history for INTC for when the Series 6 bug was discovered, followed by when Intel publicly announced it + the fix. Such an employee would be fired on the spot. I've been down this road myself (not fired, but have been taken aside due to a public post I made about an large telco provider outage near/around the time a popular Apple product was RTM'd. I gave no details, only acknowledging being on a 4-hour bridge for a large issue. Said telco provider figured out who I was and contacted my employer who pulled me aside one morning to discuss the whole thing). I'm not a conspiracy theorist either, but that should give you some idea how detrimental a bug/issue/flaw/outage can be to a company.

6) As an engineer myself, I do not care about the stock market, or "PR stunts" or corporate paranoia -- I want issues fixed, and I want to partake in that development + improvement process, regardless if I do it as an end-user/consumer or as a colleague/engineer. So like I said before, I do sympathise with you folks who have experienced this problem, I've been there in one way or another.

Sorry for the long-winded rant, but I feel torn on the matter. There's the reality of the matter -- corporate world, things take a long time (months), employees are constantly busy, PR concerns over product bugs, etc. -- and there's the working-class world and consumer idealism, where 48 hour turnaround time is considered excessive and it feels like the end of the world when a product fails/breaks. I totally agree that a company could/should have people who can communicate with end-users about issues in a prompt manner, but most companies "shield" engineers from communicating with end-users, not to mention a lot of engineers don't have the time (truly!) to sit around doing generic Technical Support. That's what Intel Customer Support (via phone) is for.

[idata]

this thread getting OOT in some ways

people who have problem, rather than sharing more information about their failed drive, they just looking for "refund" @carstenno offense and not for trolling, but are you always ask for refund for product that failed on you ?The reason why i, personally suggesting RMA is :1. Because the issue so far only effect small amount of user, even though it somewhat more widespread compared to X25-M2. AFAIK every computer parts is like that, not only SSD, HDD/mobo/PSU when have issue you have to RMA first before you can ask refund, because its possibly you get defect product. well its depends again on manufacture/retailer policy which some give 30days refund, but thats the warranty for, you get a product works within warrantyNow i want to know, which manufacture give you full refund when a product failed on you first time ?If you saying how about your DATA, well afaik there no SSD/HDD company include data recovery in their warranty, they will just replace your failed drive Now you, yourself said "SSD is not a mature technology, all manufacturers have or have had issues"so you already aware there might any issue from not a mature technologyeven though you pick intel ssd not because particular reason, do you think that the failure rate on other SSD company less than 1%?do you have fact? do you read on other company forum? I have been suggesting people that got fail on their SSD to share us some informationlike their SSD Batch# /Version# including their pc specification, what their power setting, etcwhich i hope we get some hint while waiting for intel reps respondYou indeed share some information, but what you share is mostly what you done after the drive failed, plus you using other company tools which don't help the situation, another things i curious is even though logically it should works, but Intel have migration tools, for their SSD, why you use acronis instead?

[idata]

slyphnier,

Since you yourself mention it I won't have to point out how off-topic this thread continues to be. I shall attempt to answer your questions however. Apologies to our regular viewers.

A full refund in my mind would be perfectly reasonable, given that Intel so far has failed to provide any kind of assurance that they are on top of the issue, and as far as I can determine would not be able to guarantee that a replacement drive is not going to suffer from the exact same problem.

In other words, until Intel provides a fix for this, a replacement drive is going to be worthless to me because I am not going to be able to trust it with my data. Since I cannot wait for months (potentially, who knows?) until Intel manages to sort this out, today I have just forked out another $1000 to buy a disk of a different brand (*).

You can find forum posts going back to 2009 complaining about this "8 MB issue", so it's not like they haven't had the time to do something about it.

I am genuinely curious as to why you think that just because only a small number of users are affected they should not be given a refund. How is the number of affected users related to the return policy? (other than through the company's bottom line, but I digress...)

And how do you know it's only a small number, and that number is not going to grow over the next few months? The 320 Series has only been out since March, I believe.

I am not interested in other SSD makers' return rates and don't spend time on their forums. I expect manufacturers to be responsible and honest about shortcomings in their products. But perhaps that is too much to ask.

I was not aware that Intel provides migration tools, and even if I had known I would still have used Acronis because it's a great tool that has never let me down, plain and simple.

I can't believe I spent time writing this.

Now please can we get on topic.Thank you.(*) And just to preempt the nitpickers out there: The details of this purchase are completely irrelevant to this thread, so please don't start a pointless discussion on the merits of one brand/model/revision over another.

[idata]

@carsten

Small number = failure/defect product from production which always there in any productionBig number such is B3 accident = design issue which need to be fixed/updatedBecause there are failure/defect products thats why company give warranty for their product The fact is a this point the issue only affected to small number of user, if it grew in time we don't know yetand something in the future is out of our reach, like other parts in your pc that can fail anytimeand even more people reporting the issue, it don't translate to increased failure rate because when another people report we don't know how many ssds already sold.. so like 100sold unit / 1 fail report, 1000sold unit / 10 fail report = same 1% fail report Anyway help me with sharing some information from your SSD fail issue 1. What from you clone? do you clone from another SSD or HDD ?2. you havent mention the OS you clone, do you clone Windows?3. if you cloning Windows, do you aware that fresh install with HDD and SSD have some kind different settingi have been reading you need align the partition if you do clone, example :http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/storage/18542-moving-os-hdd-ssd.html http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/storage/18542-moving-os-hdd-ssd.htmleven though there no prove but there possibility that end up glitching the ssd

[idata]

slyphnier:

Do you work at Intel? Because otherwise your statement that it is a "fact" that only a "small number" of people have been affected is nonsense.

Of all the 320 owners who have been affected by this 8MB bug, only a fraction of them will have the knowledge and troubleshooting skills to determine that it actually was the 8MB bug that caused their SSD failure. Of those that know that the 8MB bug caused their SSD failure, only a fraction of those will post about it in a forum that you have read. Therefore only an unknown fraction of an unknown fraction of the people affected by the bug are known to you. And unless you work at Intel, you do not know the denominator either (number of 320 SSDs sold). So, unless you work at Intel, it is absurd for you to claim as fact that only a small number of people have been affected.

Furthermore, even if it is true that the annual failure rate (AFR) of 320 SSDs due to the 8MB bug is less than 2% (a small number, right?), that is a very serious problem for the 320 series. Really, the only reason anyone would buy a 320 rather than another SSD is because the 320 is more reliable. There are any number of SSDs that can be purchased with higher performance than the 320. Since the X25-M series had an AFR of well under 1%, I assumed that the 320 series would be the same or better. But if I now find out that the 320 series has an AFR of 2%, then I am never going to buy another 320 series SSD, because there are other SSDs with about 2% AFR that have significantly higher performance than the 320 series.