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]

Are you intel engineer / representative or just want to know out of pure curiosity? What are you going to do with this information, considering the fact you know nothing about these SSDs? The bug was already explained several times in both threads - after reboot or freeze you end with 8Mb disk instead of regular capacity. Serial number become "BAD_CTX". All data is lost. That's all.

[idata]

Vit wrote:

Are you intel engineer / representative or just want to know out of pure curiosity? What are you going to do with this information, considering the fact you know nothing about these SSDs? The bug was already explained several times in both threads - after reboot or freeze you end with 8Mb disk instead of regular capacity. Serial number become "BAD_CTX". All data is lost. That's all.

I'm an engineer, but not from Intel. I'm extremely familiar with storage subsystems (primarily SCSI, SATA, and mechanical HDDs). I've also done things like implement SMART support in FreeBSD's atacontrol utility, in addition to write/maintain software that monitors thermal and acoustic statistics on a FreeBSD system (hardware monitoring) using server-class motherboards.

Both threads have people saying "you end up with an 8MByte disk instead of regular capacity", yet the two links I provided in my previous post have people who are suffering from the problem showing their drives are still reporting full capacity (not 8MBytes).

I need to know where people are getting the 8MByte value from when the drive itself still appears to be returning the proper number of LBAs (drive capacity) when software issues an ATA IDENTIFY (0xEC) command (specifically bytes 100-103 of the ATA response block).

It looks like /message/133478# 133478 afrosty's post has the most recent information from Intel on this matter -- it appears they've been able to reproduce the problem and are in the process of validating a firmware-level fix for it.

[idata]

There seems to be an update from INTEL here: http://communities.intel.com/message/133505 http://communities.intel.com/message/133505 (first post was updated on July 24th)..

[Alan_F_Intel]

Pls look for update on new discussion thread labeled:

/message/133478# 133478 Update on "Bad Context 13x Error"

alan

[idata]

FYI, I just had something very much like this happen, where my Intel SSD shows up as 8MB, however here are some differences from the other reports here:

• The drive in question is a 32GB X-25E (Kingston labeled, it reports Intel in the BIOS)
• This drive did not lose power when this happened. The drive is in our hosting facility and has rather serious power infrastructure behind it (in-cabinet transfer switch that switches between two upstream feeds, each feed comes from an independent in-room transfer switch fed from two independent schoolbus-sized UPSes).

Here are the specifics:

• The drive is an X25-E 32GB labeled as the Kingston drive. I got it used off of ebay, I don't know the status of the firmware version.
• There was existing data on it, so I wiped it when it arrived. I had installed Ubuntu Natty on it, in the laptop that you now have. I hadn't noticed any problems. I then moved it over to act as the boot drive on a Supermicro server (500MB or so as /boot), and the remaining space were used as a ZFS intent log and level-2 cache ("L2ARC" in the parlance of ZFS).
• This worked fine for around 2 weeks.
• Sometime around 3 days ago, I got a bunch of drive errors related to this device, and ZFS noticed the errors and stopped using it. Because it was only used for logging and cache, it's failure didn't interrupt service.
• I decided to try to reboot and see if I could access it again. Before I did, I tried to "umount /boot", and got the output I'm pasting below.
• On the reboot, the BIOS was hanging when it was trying to detect that drive.
• I did a power-cycle.
• It no longer hangs, but it won't boot off that drive. The BIOS sees the drive, but now it says it's an 8MB drive. See attached screen-shots.