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."
Re:Development process is flawed (Score:5, 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.
Re:Development process is flawed (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Smart Machines (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.
"Closed Source Filesystem" (Score:5, Interesting)
This post really needs a link to:
http://lwn.net/Articles/355149/ [lwn.net]
"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.