Comments Locked

14 Comments

Back to Article

  • Beenthere - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 - link

    While I have more faith in InHel's testing than some other companies, let's hope they did a proper validation on the firmware fix so they don't create other issues.
  • damianrobertjones - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 - link

    Now all we need is an update for the M4 cold boot issue where the owner gets a blank screen due to the SSD not starting in time. The new Probook and Elitebook line suffers from this issue due to the bios flying through it's initial startup.

    It's a shame that we have to visit support forums for this type of information
  • SSDelightful - Thursday, August 18, 2011 - link

    Just a note that this comment is referencing a problem unrelated to the Intel SSD 320 series. Thought I'd clarify!!
    -Scott,
    Intel Corporation
  • rs2 - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 - link

    At least, I hope "presumably after a long period of validation testing" was intended as sarcasm.
  • lyeoh - Thursday, August 18, 2011 - link

    Most SSD customers appear to be paying for the privilege to do "long period validation testing" for the SSD manufacturers ;).
  • iMotive - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 - link

    Do you guys think its that important for me to upgrade the firmware for these?
    I have two of them in raid 0 in my macbook, and I don't seem to have any issues.
    They are two 160gb and I have 319.4gb available.
    I definitely don't have any issues with only 8mb being available.
    It seems like such a chore to have to backup my entire raid, then update each one.
    I'm also getting the feeling that updating them in raid isn't very easy. I'll probably have to take them out of raid and redo my raid array. This would be a chore.
  • Goi - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 - link

    You know what's a chore? Recovering from the error if and when it does happen to you...
  • cbass64 - Thursday, August 18, 2011 - link

    I had a 6 drive RAID 0 with these and all 6 of them showed up as 8MB on the same day...so yeah I'd suggest flashing the firmware. Luckily mine was just setup for benchmarking...no real data on them.
  • iMotive - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 - link

    Not to mention I would have to install them into my windows rig to actually update them....then reinstall them into my mac...

    Again this just seems unnecessary if this issue isn't happening to me.
    Does the firmware have any performance increases?
  • maharajah - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 - link

    Install is an .iso. Non-destructive update on Mac from CDROM.
  • NCM - Thursday, August 18, 2011 - link

    So we should understand that you've taken the time, trouble and expense to configure a two member RAID with SSDs, but that you don't bother to do backups? And this with a Mac, where Time Machine makes regular, automated backups a trivial affair?

    Sheesh.
  • iMotive - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link

    No CDROM drive in my macbook. That is used for the second SSD.
    I do backups of my important data. Not time machine however, and i was able to get the SSDs for a really good price and installing them was fine, but that was just starting scratch and I was excited to get a boatload of performance. I'm not a fan of doing the same work for 0 noticeable gains.
    I was mainly just wondering how widespread the issue was. If it just randomly showed up after the drives working fine over time, or if was more an 8mb out of the box type issue.
    From the sounds of it I guess I will have to set aside some time to do all of this. The main reason is it is a hassle is because I will have to do a drive clone, then uninstall them and put them into my windows rig, as my macbook has no cd-drive. It is used by the second ssd drive bay. Flash them, then I must reinstall them back into my macbook and set up the raid array once more, then transfer the clone again. All just to make sure this doesn't happen to me and force me to do all this. I guess better safe than sorry.
  • magr01ino - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link

    The issue seems not to be fixed, in fact there are people posting in the intel community forums that they experienced the bug AFTER having updated to the new firmware again (http://communities.intel.com/message/136655#136655...
    German tech sites have written about this already, too: http://www.golem.de/1108/85871.html (translated with google: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl...
  • !@#$% - Saturday, October 22, 2011 - link

    This is definitely still an issue and Anandtech is doing its readers a disservice by towing the company line and reporting it as fixed, The 320 drives are still getting bricked at 8 megs AFTER the firmware update. This thread reports on these specifically:

    http://communities.intel.com/thread/24339?start=0&...

    It's shameful that a company as profitable as Intel not take any action to either fix or recall this product. These drives are currently being sold every day to unsuspecting customers. This totally blows the idea that SSD is secure reliable media out of the water. Single drive laptop users are particularly vulnerable, as all data is lost. Caveat emptor!!!

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now