Intel Pulls SSD Firmware Day After Release 125
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."
Development process is flawed (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.
Re:Development process is flawed (Score:5, 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.
Re:Development process is flawed (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.
Re:This is off-topic and I appologize... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Development process is flawed (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.
Re:Development process is flawed (Score:1, Insightful)
So what you're saying is you bought a used product from a company that did not offer you a warranty, and expected the manufacturer to offer you, someone who they did not sell a product to, a warranty on a product that you did not buy from them?
Re:This is off-topic and I appologize... (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Development process is flawed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is off-topic and I appologize... (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [slashdot.org] Specifically -
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 [catb.org] 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.