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]

Koitsu,

Your advice is good and sound in a general context, but you are barking up the wrong tree.

You seem to have got the impression I've made several "posts discussing HPA", when in fact I only did one post on the topic, and that one even dismisses the idea that HPA is at fault.

I did not go to "great lengths using a multitude of non-useful tools". My experimentation was entirely focused on verifying the suggestion that HPA was the problem, and I used exactly two tools for that purpose: A well known open source utility and a proprietary tool recommended by Acronis.

At no point did I encourage "running random utilities". On the contrary, I published my findings so others wouldn't have to.

To bring the discussion somewhat back on topic, I think you and others who are suggesting to RMA our drives are missing the point.

Unless Intel is willing to offer a full refund, an RMA would only seem like a waste of time to me.

I know I certainly wouldn't trust any replacement drive until this flaw has been identified and a fix provided.

Your mileage may vary.

And just in case someone thinks I am picking on Intel, I certainly didn't mean to.

SSD is not a mature technology, all manufacturers have or have had issues, and I fully accept that my particular disk happens to be one of the less than 1% of drives expected to fail within the first year.

Rather, it is the complete lack of any substantive information from Intel that is disappointing, especially since this issue appears to have been known for some time.

[idata]

slyphnier,

For fear of feeding the troll, are you suggesting that people should not be entitled to a refund until their drive conks out a third time?

You can't be serious.

[idata]

carsten, I agree that whatever this problem is needs to be investigated in full, please don't get me wrong.

But usually the way these investigations are done is through customers sending their bad drives back to Intel with a full explanation of the problem (include something printed/written in the box explaining the issue) for analysis. Obviously this is a form of RMA; you get a replacement drive, and Intel tries to figure out what went wrong (hopefully, rather than just throwing the drive in a recycled-parts bin). Commonly a Technical Support Manager for the company will appear and recommend people send him/her their drives directly to ensure proper engineers get the hardware which is suspect. I've worked with many companies in this regard in the past (Supermicro, Logitech, and at one point IBM), but it usually requires them to extend the hand first.

Sounds great, right? So you'll say: "so where's the helping hand? All we have is an Intel rep. saying they're looking into the issue". True. They still need to extend that helping hand, in my opinion. You do realise how large Intel is, right? And how much red tape there is in the corporate world? And how a simple change or issue can literally take months before anything is said or done? That's how large companies operate, here in the US anyway. So please be patient. Patient means months, not days. If you can't wait that long, your choices are to submit a standard RMA and hope for the best, or try to get a refund from the vendor/distributor and purchase a different product.

Anyway: the fact that you've run utilities on your drive "to try and get it working again" -- stuff that's intended for mechanical HDDs, in addition to the utility being non-Intel -- almost certainly rule you out from being able to send Intel your drive / participate in such an investigation. I'm sure you understand why. This is why I posted what I did previously, and the post prior to that (the one with red text). It'd be a real disappointment for those experiencing this problem, who aren't familiar with storage subsystems, to go and "mess about" with software hoping it'll magically fix their drive, only to later find out that all they can do is get a general replacement/standard RMA. What I'm saying: if you want to help Intel with the issue, do not start messing about with software trying to "repair your drive" with the logic of "it can't get any worse".

Hope that makes sense.

[idata]

Koitsu,

EOD.

[idata]

No, it does not make sense. Saying that Intel is a big company and therefore cannot respond to bugs quickly is absurd. Any company, no matter how big, is made up of people organized into groups. There should be a group responsible for product support and maintenance for Intel SSDs, and one or more product engineers specifically responsible for the Intel 320 series of SSDs. This problem was first reported to Intel in May for the 320 series (perhaps even earlier), and in a similar form was reported for the X25-M series many, many months ago. It is extremely disappointing that no one from Intel can provide more information on this problem, or even confirm that anyone at Intel is working on fixing the bug.

We know the group responsible for motherboard chipsets at Intel can respond quickly to problems. If only the people in the Intel SSD group could respond half as well as they did, then this problem would have long since been solved.

Intel's handling of this SSD bug leaves much to be desired. Since Intel is not providing any useful information, then I see no problem with people who have experienced the bug experimenting. I certainly will if any of my SSDs experience the 8MB bug.