Update on "Bad Context 13x Error"

[Alan_F_Intel]

Intel has been investigating the 'Bad Context 13x Error' as seen on select Intel® SSD 320 Series drives. This was previously noted in the Intel community post as "SSD Power Loss". To summarize the error: In certain circumstances, after an unexpected power loss, a small percentage of SSDs may experience this error on the next attempt to boot the system. In this situation, the system's BIOS reports an SSD as an 8MB capacity drive.

Intel has reproduced 'Bad Context 13x Error' utilizing strenuous testing methods. This 'Bad Context 13x Error' can be addressed via a firmware update and Intel is in the process of validating the firmware update. A future update will define the schedule to deliver the firmware fix.

The Intel SSD 320 Series continues to be shipped and is available for purchase. If you experience this error 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) .

For those with Intel SSD 320 series SSDs who are concerned but currently unaffected, Intel advises the following actions:

• As with any storage device, backup your data regularly
• When shutting down your system, follow your system's standard shutdown process
• Minimize unplugging the SSD while your system is powered

Intel takes these issues seriously. Please watch for further updates on this site.

Rgds,

Alan

Intel's NVM Solutions Group

[idata]

Vegan,

You made an incredibly bold claim about SSDs not being suitable as a OS drive, then provide literally no reason, proof or even theory as to why this is the case. And that makes sense, because the claim is ignorant at best and has no foundation.

[Vegan]

NTFS and other journalling file systems make many small writes. That degrades SSD performance significantly.

That is why I recommend using it for ReadyBoost as I explained on my site here a few times.

[idata]

vegan wrote:

NTFS and other journalling file systems make many small writes. That degrades SSD performance significantly.

That is why I recommend using it for ReadyBoost as I explained on my site here a few times.

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According to Microsoft, the OS file system makes 40 reads to every write, and 60% of those writes are 8KB or less. I have 4 SSDs running 4 OS systems and not one of them have degraded. I am not sure where you get your information or if you just make it up as you go along, but OS drives is what SSDs are made for, and do quite well at it.

Take a look at for how they handle writes

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SSD-Write-Endurance-25nm-Vs-34nm/page49 http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SSD-Write-Endurance-25nm-Vs-34nm/page49

[Vegan]

Alignment issues are one problem as the OS and applictions try to perk up performance.

64-bit Windows with 32-bit applcations are especially prone to missalignment issues.

The file system will thus be accessed a lot simply now that 4K sectors are coming into use increasingly.

[idata]

vegan wrote:

Alignment issues are one problem as the OS and applictions try to perk up performance.

Agreed, and the performance hit for having non-8KByte-aligned partitions can be up to 50% in some cases.

vegan wrote:

64-bit Windows with 32-bit applcations are especially prone to missalignment issues.

Absolute 100% hogwash. 64-bit vs. 32-bit plays no role in regards to non-8KByte-aligned partitions. The same performance hit, and to the same degree, will occur regardless of architecture (x86 vs. x64) and regardless of OS (Windows, FreeBSD, Solaris, OS X, etc.).

vegan wrote:

The file system will thus be accessed a lot simply now that 4K sectors are coming into use increasingly.

Partial hogwash. I'm not sure if you're aware of it or not, but "4K sector" drives like the Western Digital -EARS series -- just like SSDs -- advertise their logical and physical (both!) sector sizes as 512 bytes, not 4KBytes. Here's proof (results of ATA_IDENTIFY command 0xec):

protocol ATA/ATAPI-8 SATA 2.x

device model INTEL SSDSA2CW080G3firmware revision 4PC10302serial number CVPRxxxWWN 500151795950ed66cylinders 16383heads 16sectors/track 63sector size logical 512, physical 512, offset 0LBA supported 156301488 sectorsLBA48 supported 156301488 sectorsPIO supported PIO4DMA supported WDMA2 UDMA6media RPM non-rotating

They do this to guarantee 100% compatibility with existing software; most software does assume that an LBA is 512 bytes. The alignment issue still plays a role because you'll get better performance the closer you match the internal size used by the drive. With SSDs it's an issue of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_structure_alignment memory alignment; the same issue happens within any computer, which is why http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory kernel VMs (not virtual machines) and things like libc http://www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/glibc/libc_31.html go to great lengths to ensure all allocations are done aligned to page size. If they didn't, memory I/O performance would suck.