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Intel Pulls SSD Firmware Day After Release

Posted by timothy on from the early-bird-gets-the-ream dept.

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."

12 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Development process is flawed by EmagGeek · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Development process is flawed by adisakp · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Development process is flawed by Monkeedude1212 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Development process is flawed by LitelySalted · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    4. Re:Development process is flawed by owlstead · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:Development process is flawed by owlstead · · Score: 4, Interesting

      "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.

    6. Re:Development process is flawed by 644bd346996 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    7. Re:Development process is flawed by Dragonslicer · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    8. Re:Development process is flawed by chizu · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

  2. Not just Intel by MattRog · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --

    Thanks,
    --
    Matt
  3. Re:Smart Machines by Bengie · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  4. "Closed Source Filesystem" by Bronster · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.