Intel Pulls SSD Firmware Day After Release

CWmike writes "Intel has pulled a firmware upgrade it released on Monday for its X25-M consumer solid-state drives after users complained that the software caused crashes. The company on Monday made available a software package called SSD Toolbox to monitor and manage the performance and health of X25-M SSDs on systems running Windows 7. The package included a firmware upgrade and software called SSD Optimizer that included diagnostic tools to help keep the Intel SSD running at high performance. 'We have been contacted by users with issues with the 34-nanometer Intel SSD firmware upgrade and are investigating. We take all sightings and issues seriously and are working toward resolution. We have temporarily taken down the firmware link while we investigate,' an Intel spokesman said in an e-mail. The spokesman declined to comment on when the company would issue updated firmware."

Comments

Development process is flawed

[EmagGeek]

I'm starting to think that the whole SSD market is a prime example of the modern corporate development mentality of pawning off beta testing to the general public. It's clear that SSDs are not ready for general release, but companies do not want to spend the time or money to validate them against specifications or ensure that they work properly for their particular purpose. Let the public pay for your beta test program. It's a lot cheaper.

Re:Development process is flawed

[adisakp]

I don't know any major problems with the Intel G1 SSD firmware but this is the second big issue with the G2 firmware. When the G2 drives first shipped, a bug in the firmware made it so if you changed the password, you could lose all your data.

Re:Development process is flawed

[Monkeedude1212]

When there isn't enough competition around, companies don't have to worry about Quality - the people will buy whats available, and if no one is offering a higher quality product, the low quality product will still sell.

If this market is to mature they need a company to step in with the emphasis on quality.

Re:Development process is flawed

[LitelySalted]

I guess it's the "cheaper" "cheaper" alternative to shipping your whole QA department over to India.

Re:Development process is flawed

[owlstead]

Paranoid much? There may be companies out there that haven't got a lot to loose and can play that testing game. Intel is certainly not one of them. Anyway, SSD's have been on the market quite a while, although market penetration was always low. And do you think that OS support for TRIM would be there if we had to wait for another year?

Anyway, let's wait and see what causes the (alleged) problems and we'll know what to think of it. It's a bit early to put this to corporate greed. These are complex products.

Re:Development process is flawed

[owlstead]

"If this market is to mature they need a company to step in with the emphasis on quality."

Funny, most people would think that company could be Intel. I would be very surprised if this issue was in any way expected by Intel. There were a few articles on the thorough testing performed on the G1 (firmware). With the G2 Intel seems to have lost some of that.

Re:Development process is flawed

[644bd346996]

I think it's more that nobody is taking seriously the fundamental differences between hard drives and flash. Nobody has really stopped to do a comprehensive assessment of what existing assumptions embodied in our software and users will be broken by flash memory that is asymmetric in both access speed and access granularity. As a result, the pre-Intel flash SSD controllers made really stupid trade-offs, and they ended up with drives that were less suitable for the consumer market than ordinary hard drives. Once Intel made everybody realize that latency and IOPS mattered a lot more to consumers than throughput, people moved on to the next difference, and started complaining about the lower write performance of a nearly full SSD. Even today, I still see people referring to it as a "bug", when it is nothing more than an inherent difference from the spinning platters of hard drives. Smart garbage collection (which requires smart OS support) is a way of hiding the limitation, but the lack of it isn't a bug any more than a hard drive with a small cache is faulty. It just has obvious room for improvement.

Re:Development process is flawed

[Dragonslicer]

How do you define "enough competition"? Maybe I'm just ignorant about the SSD market, but Newegg lists 8 manufacturers with more models of SSD drives than Intel, with Patriot, Kingston, and Corsair probably being the most well-known companies. That would seem to indicate that there's quite a bit of competition in the SSD market.

Re:Development process is flawed

[bberens]

The answer to "Where did you purchase the device" is always "It was a present from my aunt."

Re:Development process is flawed

[Gordo_1]

It's not flawed so much as inevitable. A portion of the market will jump at the first example of a promising technology that ships. Being the first mover in a particular space holds special significance and advantages for companies competing for market share. The thinking goes that quality can be worked on iteratively through generations of product and there will never be a time when you reach perfect quality anyway.

Moral of the story: If you don't want to beta test products for corporations, then don't buy first generation technology.

And before you argue that G2s *are* second generation drives, I would not categorize them as such. They're die-shrunk G1 drives with some bug fixes and performance tweaks. Corporations and the media are quick to claim that any improvement to a first generation technology *is* the next generation as it sells copies, clicks and product.

As a general rule, I wait at least 6 months after Anandtech and others review a product before making a new technology purchase. By then, you can usually figure out something about longer-term reliability from online discussions/reviews. As a result, I rarely have a whole lot of trouble with technology products I buy, beyond downloading the latest drivers/updates or whatnot. Sure, it means I don't have the latest bleeding edge stuff, but I also don't have to deal with the trouble that comes with paying for the opportunity to beta test.

Because SSD represents such a paradigm shift, I've chosen to hold off for at least another 6-12 months on SSDs partly to allow prices to drop and partly to account for the obvious growing pains that manufacturers have experienced over the past couple years.

Re:Development process is flawed

[Timothy Brownawell]

I think there are only about 4 kinds of controllers: Intel (used by themselves and a couple models from Kingston and one other... Corsair I think?); Indilinx (used by the rest of the decent drives, like the OCZ Vertex line); Samsung (supposedly what you typically get if you buy a computer with an SSD already installed, not particularly good); and JMicron (the really crappy early drives). I get the impression that only the Intel and Indilinx controllers are actually any good, because the others bog down under lots of small writes (slow wear leveling algorithms?).

Re:Development process is flawed

[chizu]

There was an issue with early Intel X25-M G1 SSDs. They were non-bootable with Apple MacBooks. I have one and it was hell figuring out why it didn't work in a MacBook. It's been great in a ThinkPad.

Poor, poor quality control

[Anonymous Coward]

I installed this firmware and I've never had more problems. My machine reboots 5-6 times a day and there is no end in si

Re:This is off-topic and I appologize...

[oodaloop]

Sometimes a-holes get mod points. Just keep posting insightful, informative, and interesting posts, and it will work out. It may take months to get up to Excellent.

Not just Intel

[MattRog]

Crucial's M225 (I own the 128GB version) 1711 firmware had significant bugs and was quickly yanked. In order to upgrade to the latest 1819 you have to downgrade back to 1571.

http://www.crucial.com/support/firmware.aspx

Seems as if most consumer SSD products are still a bit in the "beta" stage.

Re:This is off-topic and I appologize...

[NeutronCowboy]

It's a "feature" of the system. It means that there is no way to play favorites with official moderators. It does mean though that idiots occasionally get mod points and proceed to blow them all on modding someone down with whom they disagree.

But really, don't worry about it - idiots are still outnumbered by decent moderators without vendettas. Furthermore, this type of use is generally fixed by the metamod system: slashdot.org/metamod.pl.

I've been around for years, and this issue has always been around. After a while, you get used to it. Not to mention that your karma will get high enough to absorb drive-by moderation.

Re:Smart Machines

[Bengie]

Doesn't that defeat the purpose of standards?

That's like saying that we should get rid of the x86 instruction set and just use the micro ops. A layer of abstraction helps and is required for a standard to work.

"Closed Source Filesystem"

[Bronster]

This post really needs a link to:

http://lwn.net/Articles/355149/

"Do you want to trust your data to a closed source file system implementation which you can't debug, can't improve and — most scarily — can't even fsck when it goes wrong, because you don't have direct access to the underlying medium?"

This is what you get with a flash drive at the moment unfortunately - a closed source filesystem that presents a single "file" as a block device over sata. And this firmware update is a filesystem driver change. Ouch.

Re:This is off-topic and I appologize...

[turing_m]

You do realize, he could have figured that out by typing it into google, and reading the first link? e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//dev/null

This entity is a common inspiration for technical jargon expressions and metaphors by Unix programmers, e.g. "please send complaints to /dev/null," "my mail got archived in /dev/null," and "redirect to /dev/null" -- being jocular ways of saying, respectively: "don't bother sending complaints," "my mail was deleted," and "go away".

This is slashdot, not "ubuntuforums.org". They actually reference the sort of stuff he alludes to in the FAQ, which you can click from this very page. That's why there is no place to complain to about getting bad Karma, and why I made the (probably bad) joke about directing complaints to /dev/null - see http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml Specifically -

Karma is used to remove risky users from the moderator pool, and to assign a bonus point to users who have contributed positively to Slashdot in the past. It is not your IQ, dick length/cup size, value as a human being, or a score in a video game. It does not determine your worth as a Slashdot reader. It does not cure cancer or grant you a seat on the secret spaceship that will be traveling to Mars when the Krulls return to destroy the planet in 2012. Karma fluctuates dramatically as users post, moderate, and meta-moderate. Don't let it bother you. It's just a number in the database.

If he can't do a simple task like read a FAQ or google random jargon, perhaps he should first contemplate why he is contributing posts to a site that bills itself as "news for nerds..."? Maybe he should consider reading http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html first (a great idea for any nerd in training), and perhaps participate in a more newb targeted web forum first?

And btw I do not have any issues with the OP, and as far as I know, I have not modded the OP's posts one way or another. I just saw the opportunity for the gag so I went for it. I'm fairly sure I have had people do the exact same targeted moderation towards myself as the OP, but they always lose interest if you don't acknowledge them. And who cares, really? A lot of people browse at -1, and will read your posts regardless.