Intel Responds To X25-M Fragmentation Issue

Vigile writes "In mid-February, news broke about a potential issue with Intel's X25-M mainstream solid state drives involving fragmentation and performance slow-downs. At that time, after having the news picked up by everyone from CNet to the Wall Street Journal, Intel stated that it had not seen any of these issues but was working with the source to replicate the problem and find a fix if at all possible. Today Intel has essentially admitted to the problem by releasing a new firmware for the X25-M line that not only fixes the flaws found in the drive initially, but also increases write performance across the board."

Comments

Good for them

[mc1138]

I'd much rather have a company own up to an issue, fix it, and move on, rather than deny it or try to use PR to quiet it away.

Re:Good for them

[drinkypoo]

Makes an interesting contrast to intel's response to the FDIV bug, eh? Between this and the whole linux driver thing I'm almost inclined to suspect that intel has learned that you have to serve your customers.

Re:Good for them

[elashish14]

Agreed. Owning up to your mistakes, whether you're a company or an individual, is a sign of dependability and reliability. I don't know about you, but for me that's a major factor when I purchase something.

Re:Good for them

[adamkennedy]

There's a big difference between admitting to a bug that you can fix with a low/no-cost firmware upgrade, and admitting to a bug which requires a massive recall, and announcing to the market you'll be taking a multi-million dollar loss.

Re:Good for them

[afidel]

The fact that it was fixed AND QA'd in 3 weeks proves it was easy to fix! If you've ever worked for any large company you know three weeks is kind of the minimum for this kind of thing, you need a couple days for meetings to discuss the problem and brainstorm problems, a few days to formulate actual solutions, a few days to test, a few days for QA (minimum) and then a day or two to package it up, get with the outside content providing group and then hand something over to marketing.

Re:Good for them

[hairyfeet]

Well to be fair to Intel as you can see here the odds of anybody hitting the bug(hell the odds of Intel accidentally hitting the bug) were pretty much slim to none. Nobody(including Intel) would have probably ever found out it even HAD a bug if Thomas Nicely hadn't written a program to hunt for primes and ran it on a Pentium. Let's face it: It was 1994. Most folks were running simple spreadsheets and simple games on Windows 3.11 at the time. The odds that they would have actually been doing enough floating point number crunching to actually hit the thing was about the same as hitting the lotto while being struck by lightning.

So to be fair it wasn't like the early 360 where they knew they had a turkey and pushed it out the door anyway, or Nvidia where they pretended there wasn't anything wrong as they passed out faulty chips that fell apart. They should have handled the PR better but the odds that the average user would actually hit this thing really were pretty damned remote.

Re:Good for them

[prisoner-of-enigma]

Let's face it: It was 1994. Most folks were running simple spreadsheets and simple games on Windows 3.11 at the time. The odds that they would have actually been doing enough floating point number crunching to actually hit the thing was about the same as hitting the lotto while being struck by lightning.

While you're correct that "most folks" were not going to encounter the bug, the very people that needed the (then) high-end performance of a Pentium were the ones most likely to encounter it. I was rendering 3D animations on 3D Studio for DOS back then, and it was amazingly heavy on the FPU.

Customer Experience

[robvangelder]

I once dined at a restaurant that took my order, but minutes later realised they couldnt make it due to stock shortage. I got a different meal, and they told me mine was for free!

The way a company recovers from a problem can actually turn into a net positive experience for the customer.

In my case, I'm turned from an unsatisfied customer, to an advocate. For sure, I've recommended friends dine there since then.

Every interaction is an opportunity to delight the customer. Even those events that at first feel like a disaster unrolling.

Re:Least we could do for the readers!

[AbRASiON]

Based on your examination of the situation along with anandtechs and the fact that both OCZ and Intel seem to be aggressively improving these products, it seems to me it might be silly to even consider the X25-M or the Vertex.

Something tells me the SSD scene is moving so fast that within literally 6 months one of these 2 companies (or a competitor taking note) will have a product superior in size, speed and price to those 2 very very soon.

It's a good time to have a little bit of patience I think.
- Scott

Pace of progress

[DragonHawk]

"Something tells me the SSD scene is moving so fast that within literally 6 months one of these 2 companies (or a competitor taking note) will have a product superior in size, speed and price to those 2 very very soon."

And this is different from the rest of the computer hardware world how? :) Everything is always getting bigger, faster, cheaper, smaller, whatever.

One thing I've learned is that, in general, one should decide on a budget and make your purchase based on what's available today. Something better is *always* coming down the pike. :)