Intel Confirms Data Corruption Bug, Halts New SSDs 137
CWmike writes "Intel has confirmed that its new consumer-class X25-M and X18-M solid state-disk drives (SSDs) suffer from data corruption issues and said it has pulled back shipments to resellers. The X25-M (2.5-inch) and X18-M (1.8-inch) SSDs are based on a joint venture with Micron and used that company's 34-nanometer lithography technology. That process allows for a denser, higher capacity product that brings with it a lower price tag than Intel's previous offerings, which were based on 50-nanometer lithography technology. Intel says the data corruption problem occurs only if a user sets up a BIOS password on the 34-nanometer SSD, then disables or changes the password and reboots the computer. When that happens, the SSD becomes inoperable and the data on it is irretrievable. This is not the first time Intel's X25-M and X18-M SSDs have suffered from firmware bugs. The company's first generation of drives suffered from fragmentation issues resulting in performance degradation over time. Intel issued a firmware upgrade as a fix."
Test before you ship (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe they should have used HW/SW co-verification (like Seagate in that study [eve-team.com] - an example of how a storage company tests their firmware).
For you software developers out there who enjoy free debuggers, you should know that we, hardware designers, also have our own debuggers. Except they are a little bit more expensive (think $500,000+) and can be quite bulky. But they are the only way to really test firmware before taping-out a chip.
Re:Test before you ship (Score:5, Informative)
As a professional FW tester, I can say 1) firmware can be tested easier than the hardware verification the parent is talking about, and 2) Parent is confusing HW verification with firmware verification. Don't confuse HW verification with Firmware, and don't confuse Software testing with hardware verification. They are vastly different than each other, and have their own set of tools and methods (try sitting through a STAR East or STAR West seminar as a FW tester - it is a total waste of time).
I can (and do) test firmware on buggy hardware all day long - its not an issue.
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For you software developers out there who enjoy free debuggers, you should know that we, hardware designers, also have our own debuggers. Except they are a little bit more expensive (think $500,000+) and can be quite bulky. But they are the only way to really test firmware before taping-out a chip.
Or, if you designed your FW properly (as a piece of modularized software running with stubs and drivers for testability), you could have tested it before dumping it to a live EPROM. Or are you proposing that this was a real hardware fault, and not a problem with the firmware?
Sorry, your software is not a unique snowflake. I know you think it's special because it runs in an embedded environment, but if you chose to ignore what software developers have spent the last 60 or 70 years in developing best practi
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A little knowledge is a dangerous thing!
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What the hell is that supposed to mean? Data structures and algorithms don't suddenly work differently when they're synthesized from Verilog instead of compiled from C.
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Yes, they do.
C doesn't have voltage or current leaks.
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So how do voltage and current leaks invalidate the universal mathematical principles of computer science? I'm beginning to get a whiff of anti-intellectualism here.
Re:Typical redditor (Score:5, Insightful)
Believe me, this kicks you in the balls really hard. I still remember the frustration on my Altera course, where in simulation everything worked fine, but once flashed onto a FPGA everything went to shit.
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Re:Typical redditor (Score:4, Insightful)
If you are getting segfaults in C you usually ASSUME that the processor you are running on is acting in a deterministic manner and ASSUME the problem is your code.
The DIFFERENCE is that SOMETIMES the underlying hardware is not acting deterministically because it is a PHYSICAL system that has physical flaws or imperfections. Like leakage currents that are JUST a tiny bit too much, or depend on the state of the neighboring circuit or the temperature.
In other words, I've written C code that had "segfaults" and it wasn't the fault of the C code, it was memory issues that resulted in problems. And I've written C code that suffered from a buggy compiler, too. I've also written code that "misread" about 1% of the characters typed in at the terminal, and it wasn't the code that was at fault, it was the UART.
I don't know anything about the source of Intel's problem, but I will say that they can send me ALL of the "defective" SSDs and I'll give them a home where I promise never to set a password on the disk or change it after I do.
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Re:Typical redditor (Score:4, Informative)
Functional simulations will only catch #1.
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On a chip, adding 2^256-1 and 1 may not equal 2^256 when:
5. You're using an original Pentium
(cheap shot, but since it's an intel story...)
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C doesn't have voltage or current leaks.
But C has a lot more loops and pointers, which makes verification a lot harder (I work on a static analysis tool for C/C++, and it's also very expensive ;) )
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I guess in hardware static analysis is easier, and dynamic analysis is harder.
The link I saw seemed to indicate static analysis.
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Static analysis of concurrent code quickly hits problems with combinatorial explosion. I w
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Doesn't Java have leaks?
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Yes, it doesn't work. If you ever tried to design something using Verilog or VHDL, and tried to generate a real-world design, either an FPGA or a real chip, you will see that things aren't so easy.
I learned it the hard way, while doing my last year of undergraduate course. The simulation worked perfectly - correct input, correct output. On the other hand, making it work on the FPGA was a horrible, horrible, horrible job. Took 2 weeks of trying this, trying that, still with no clue.
Although the problem w
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"Or are you just new around here?"
I would ask the same of you, replying to an obvious troll like that :P
Ugh... summary.... (Score:3, Informative)
"The company's first generation of drives suffered from fragmentation issues resulting in performance degradation over time."
The performance degradation in the Intel X-25 is not because of a "firmware bug". All SSD's will suffer performance degradation whether or not their writing/wear leveling algorithms have been updated via firmware.
Re:Ugh... summary.... (Score:5, Informative)
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"Although Intel acknowledged that all of its SSDs will suffer from reduced performance because of significant fragmentation, the type of write levels needed to reproduce PC Perspective's results aren't likely for everyday users, whether they're running Windows and Apple's Mac OS X. Even so, it still released the firmware upgrade to slow fragmentation."
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Unusually bad? More severe than necessary? Not really. Even with this supposed degradation, it was ages ahead of any and all competition. What was unusually bad was the complete lack of understanding from all reviewers who did not understand basic principles and the fundamental limitations of flash and yet rushed ahead with their articles. Those poor fools expected that the driver should behave lik
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Between spare sectors and the fact that sectors are not physical things (they are mapped), no, you won't hit the 10000 rewrite limit relatively quickly.
To put it more clearly, recent wear leveling algorithms move full sectors, spreading writes over the entirety of the actual physical storage.
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Don't answer with generalities unless you have really thought about it. Wear-leveling is based on heuristics; since it cannot predict the future it is always possible to construct scenarios which will hit the worst case. And if it is theoretically possible, it will happen.
Imagine a simple case and go from there. Imagine a flash with 5 blocks total, 4 sectors per block. The logical capacity is 16 sectors; the extra block is over-provisioned for wear leveling, etc. Now, imagine that you have the 4 blocks neat
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Your numbers are wrong. In the degenerate case you have one erase cycle per sector write. The erase limit is 10,000. Multiply that by the number of free blocks (not sectors, but blocks - one block is at least 128K) and you get the result for the worst case.
Let's say 1MB extra free space. That is 8 blocks and 80,000 writes. Clearly within the realm of possibility.
Of course this just a lower bound, but is worth thinking about.
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But instead of data loss that you get when a hard drive looses a sector, the the ssd sector just becomes read only when it fails. Your data is still there and can be mapped somewhere else by the firmware.
I'd much rather trust my data to a drive that will gradually start shrinking after a few years then one that totally fails.
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Well, yes (although that is not my experience with industrial Compact Flash drives; but presumably Intel did better than that).
But don't forget that NAND flash deteriorates on its own without writing. It needs to be scrubbed periodically and sectors moved around even if you are not writing to it or not accessing it at all!
Too early to adopt (Score:2)
What makes Intel a hard disk vendor anyway? Yes, it is still a disk. Expertise which Intel doesn't have is a huge factor along with software support.
Other alternative? It is "OCZ" and Samsung. What kind of software support do they give? Zero. Samsung can't even produce pages without english spelling mistakes.
Call me old fashioned, I am waiting and will continue to wait until Seagate, Western Digital does real stuff, not "we can do it too" stuff if you understand what I mean.
Re:Too early to adopt (Score:4, Insightful)
What makes Intel a hard disk vendor anyway? Yes, it is still a disk
It's solid state mass storage, where "solid state" = "chips". A disk is a spinning thingy which is completely different. Since Intel designs and make chips (see: "solid state" = "chips"), it is a perfect choice for them to make solid state mass storage devices out of chips.
Have I mentioned the relationship between "solid state" and "chips" and how "solid state" != "spinning thingy"?
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Not that I'm on either side of this but...
Is there some kind of brand of HD that doesn't "wear out"?
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Then you need to start looking for some new way to store data, since traditional hard disks eventually wear out as well. As any mechanical device it will suffer wear, and sooner or later something will get out of tolerance.
Everything wears out at some point. Moving hard disk parts wear out mechanically, all chips will e
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I speak about 2K raw video editing along with sound. We are waiting for the technology really becoming mature enough to replace our 300mb/sec magnetic sas-scsi setup. Yes, it will be still (i) SCSI, likely powered by ATTO.
The medium is not trustable for professional usage, under very high speeds. We wait for the medium to become "ordinary", it is likely the pro setups will be first offered by AVID partners first, in 2K and 4K level. Apple FCP partners can give the signal on OS X land too, when the first Xse
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IMO, SSDs are the wrong tech for your problem.
Video, in my understanding, requires huge amounts of storage, and fast contiguous writes. Hard disks fit perfectly fine for those requirements, and there's no need to even try to switch to SSDs.
SSDs have their advantage in their very low latency, which you probably don't care about. However your case is a very specialized usage that's very far from what a normal desktop uses, so your criticism has little relevance on that market.
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I'm not even going to put a foot in the flamefest over whether solid state mass storage is cost effective or even reliable - I only ask you don't call some chips that just sit there a spinning disk.
More than 1/4 of Intel's revenue comes from miscellaney chips [intc.com] and motherboards that are not microprocessors. That's a big enough chunk it shouldn't be dismissed as not a core business.
That this bug made it through means someone should be looking for employment and indicates a problem with managem
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I was just saying it is early to adopt, Intel is NOT a experienced storage manufacturer, the constant speed and reliability needs of current professional video and movie editing projects are near bank mainframe levels.
That 15K Seagate SCSI will continue to spin until Seagate starts shipping their pro level solutions in solid state form.
BTW, guess what those motherboard chipsets are used for? Intel CPUs.
Re:Ugh... summary.... (Score:4, Informative)
The performance degradation in the Intel X-25 is not because of a "firmware bug".
Bugs can cause slowdowns, too
Though it's highly regarded, Intel's X25-M SSD had a firmware bug that adjusted the priorities of random and sequential writes, leading to a major fragmentation problem that dropped throughput dramatically. The issue was originally uncovered by PC Perspective after two months of testing. Those tests showed that write speeds dropped from 80MB/sec. to 30MB/sec. over time, and read speeds dropped from 250MB/sec. to 60MB/sec. for some large block writes.
https://www.techworld.com.au/article/302571/ssd_performance_--_slowdown_inevitable?pp=3 [techworld.com.au]
Before firmware update
the result suggested a write speed of 30 MB/sec.
http://pcper.com/article.php?aid=691&type=expert&pid=3 [pcper.com]
After firmware update
After composing myself, I did the same file copy I had tried earlier. 76 MB/sec.
http://pcper.com/article.php?aid=691&type=expert&pid=4 [pcper.com]
Not a firmware bug?
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""Although Intel acknowledged that all of its SSDs will suffer from reduced performance because of significant fragmentation, the type of write levels needed to reproduce PC Perspective's results aren't likely for everyday users, whether they're running Windows and Apple's Mac OS X. Even so, it still released the firmware upgrade to slow fragmentation.."
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Adding an optimization does not mean that the previous revision was a bug.
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You're missing several months of history here.
Back in February, several reviewers found that the X-25s performance fell to unacceptably low levels after a certain threshold was reached. Intel tried to deny it, saying that you'd never see the problem in real-world usage and only benchmarking the dis
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I remember it completely differently. The way I remember it went like this:
Anandtech discovered that write performance on JMICRON controllers (not used by Intel) went to practically zero with time. The writer (and other publications I believe) went looking for the same issue in non-JMICRON controllers, and discovered that while Intel controllers were by far the least affected, they still suffered some degradation. Intel quickly updated their firmware, while everyone else (who had much more severe issues) ei
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It was my understanding that the performa
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The performance degradation in the Intel X-25 is not because of a "firmware bug". All SSD's will suffer performance degradation whether or not their writing/wear leveling algorithms have been updated via firmware.
1) As ShadowRangerRIT [slashdot.org] pointed out, it is a bug.
2) These [fusionio.com] don't suffer performance degradation, so your "all" comment is 100% incorrect.
However, if you want to apply that statement to all crappy consumer SSDs powered by Intel or JMicron controllers, then I will happily submit defeat.
Well.. (Score:2)
I find it difficult to really blame them for this. What an obscure bug. How do you QA yourself out of something like that without spending more than you did on your R&D?
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Take a down payment from your users as a massive discount in exchange for them signing on as "beta testers." If they actually find something wrong with the product and send in problem reports, then they get to keep the product for just that initial down payment so long as they keep sending in problem reports. If no problem reports come in within a given amount of time, bill them the remainder of the MSRP on the product, since it obviously works well enough for their uses.
I guarantee you something like this
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this a cost issue, or a thoroughness issue?
No, we dont catch every possible scenerio here, either, but we do try very, very hard. Knowing one of the coders in Intel's RAID drivers groups, he goes crazy with stuff. And he just writes Linux drivers. I do not envy him - this past year, every bug he's had to fix has been caused by someone else's code. Someone not writing Intel drivers. And he gets slammed every time for bad testing, as if he can test all the rest of the kernel team's stiff, NTM every fly-by-night Chinese hardware outfit. They're killing him.
I can't even say 'ext4', he just goes insane. Though he chuckles when I whisper 'ReiserFS', and opens another beer.
I'm glad I'm not in that line of work.
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I can't even say 'ext4', he just goes insane. Though he chuckles when I whisper 'ReiserFS', and opens another beer.
Perhaps a competitor has discovered this and hired someone to whisper "ReiserFS ReiserFS ReiserFS" in his ear repeatedly. That would explain the bugs. He's coding drunk.
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I've seen this before (Score:2)
Intel says the data corruption problem occurs only if a user sets up a BIOS password on the 34-nanometer SSD, then disables or changes the password and reboots the computer.
What does this mean? The flash drive has a password lockout? If so:
(1) a password lockout on a drive is daft, you want to encrypt the drive or not worry about it.
(2) flash drives trashing themselves irretreivably when you reboot after enabling passwords? I've seen that before, on "secure" thumb drives. I won't have anything to do wit tha
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That's hardly daft. I have motion-detecting laser bullets in my foyer, but I still lock my front door.
Re:I've seen this before (Score:5, Insightful)
Why bother though? If someone breaks in, you'll have to fix or replace your front door, even though the motion-detecting laser robots zapped him. If you just leave your front door unlocked instead, intruders can just walk in, and the laser-wielding robots can zap him, and then automatically dispose of the body for you too. This way, the intruder won't cause any damage.
Re:I've seen this before (Score:5, Funny)
You'll sleep better that way.
Re:I've seen this before (Score:4, Funny)
The maid I can understand, but if your neighbor's kids are anything like mine, they're not innocent.
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If only because your homeowners insurance requires it for them to maintain full liability?
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You have things backwards.
Encrypting the drive ... in software, mind, not in the drive's firmware ... is like locking the front door. It's simple, safe, works for all doors, and is unlikely to break down and kill someone accidentally.
Putting a password on the drive is like leaving the door unlocked and booby-trapped.
Feature Not A Bug (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, I'd say this is in the By Design bucket. For the security conscious - set a BIOS password. If the (feds/aliens/wife/others) remove the password, all access to the data is gone.
Brilliant! Secure!
Mind you, not being able to change my password once every other day might hinder my current security model.
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It is important to set the password on the hard drive itself and delete the password in the BIOS when "they" come. Setting a BIOS password for the computer itself is the only option on many desktop computers and would be a waste of time. When "they" come they will boot the computer, see the password, giggle madly, mock you, turn the computer off, disassemble the computer, remove the drives and happily read the contents of the hard drives on another computer. For really stupidly broken motherboards, and r
According to Intel (Score:1)
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Yes, you must be new to computers since hard disks have had passwords for years. It was a popular feature in the "enterprise" market before full-disk encryption became practical.
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Password protection was supported for a long time, and is a part of the standard ATA specifiation. Although it typically has nothing to do with full-disk encryption, it was more or less enough to keep honest people honest, and add a little bit of cost+effort to bypass it.
Many RAID controllers use this feature to prevent the user from connecting a RAID-formatted hard drive to a normal ATA controller, thereby accidently destroying all data. Unlocking the drive is a non-issue, since they use the same passwor
Non-destructive fw update coming + rave on G2 (Score:3, Informative)
Although this bug should have been caught faster it seems that it is possible to update the firmware without any data loss (fortunately I have put it in a laptop, power outages are no problem). I've looked at the Intel site and the flash utility seems to be simply bootable from CD - if this is the last bug I'll be a very happy punter indeed.
My 80 GB G2 SSD replaced a not too fast laptop drive. I'm now trying Linux, but I'll try Vista as well just for fun - I'll just write my 80 GB to an external drive using Gparted. These drives come highly recommended even if they would slow down to 50% of performance (which, it seems, they don't). I unzipped Eclipse to it and JavaDoc and I could see that the archiver that unzipped the .zip has some performance issues reading the index. It took longer than the unzipping and gunzipping and untarring (the Eclipse gunzipping/untarring took less than 2 seconds - yikes). The only thing faster is the tmpfs in RAM which I used to compile the OpenJDK in on my "workstation". Starting Eclipse takes now less time on my laptop than on my workstation even though it got twice as few cycles.
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My 80 GB G2 SSD replaced a not too fast laptop drive. I'm now trying Linux, but I'll try Vista as well just for fun - I'll just write my 80 GB to an external drive using Gparted. These drives come highly recommended even if they would slow down to 50% of performance (which, it seems, they don't). I unzipped Eclipse to it and JavaDoc and I could see that the archiver that unzipped the .zip has some performance issues reading the index. It took longer than the unzipping and gunzipping and untarring (the Eclipse gunzipping/untarring took less than 2 seconds - yikes). The only thing faster is the tmpfs in RAM which I used to compile the OpenJDK in on my "workstation". Starting Eclipse takes now less time on my laptop than on my workstation even though it got twice as few cycles.
This just goes to show how much of a bottle neck traditional hard drives really are. A friend of mine recently replaced his hard drive in with an SSD and I was extremely impressed by the speed improvement - so much so that I'm considering installing an SSD drive on my computer as the primary hard drive and using the second as backup space.
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If your OS is small enough, skip the Flash SSD altogether, get 4GB of cheap DDR memory and a Gigabyte i-RAM SSD and put your OS on that.
Next "Ask Slashdot"... (Score:4, Funny)
"How to recover lost/corrupted files from an SSD?"
I know who should answer (Score:2)
Ones who flames us whenever we say "it is early, don't beta test storage hardware" should come up and answer them. Especially when it is predictably personal memories which has no backup.
In an enterprise environment which X-25 was originally designed for, data loss is not a huge problem. They have all kinds of backups,verification, mirroring and cool filesystems like ZFS. When it comes to personal data of ordinary OS X or Windows user, the problem begins. Whenever they suggest an untested technology to ordi
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And the CSR on the other end when called should not be able to mute, end, or transfer the call without supervisor assistance.
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Put it in a freezer for a bit...
---
For those who don't get it, the above post is humour, not ignorance.
At least it's not Seagate (Score:1, Informative)
WOM (Score:1)
It sounds like Signetics WOM (Write Only Memory) to me! http://www.national.com/rap/Story/WOMorigin.html [national.com]
Solid State Disk Revolution (Score:3, Insightful)
This really seems like a very unlikely event to happen to trigger the problem on these drives for most users since from my experience personally and professionally I have yet to see anyone actually know about BIOS passwords, much less about setting a password on the drive using the ATA secure drive password feature. I am surprised that this was even caught by anyone unless it was a complete fluke or there actually are people or companies using this type of a feature for security. (I don't doubt it but haven't seen it.)
I personally own the first generation Intel X25-M 80GB MLC SSD [intel.com] and I have written about it extensively here on this forum. I heard rumors that the new TRIM feature support will only made available to this second generation release of these drives but I'm unsure if that is really true. I'm on the fence right now whether I should sell my G1 drive and upgrade to the G2 because of this feature and also for a little more performance because I am so happy with the performance of this drive and also the current 8820 firmware that solved the fragmentation and slowdown issues.
If you are one of those folks who is still sitting around not knowing what to do when all of this Solid State Disk news is coming out all over then you are missing the biggest paradigm shift to computing performance since the transfer from floppy disks to hard drives.
With the upcoming re-release of this newly affordable drive around 2009-08-28 from Intel X25-M G2 80GB MLC SSD at ~$230 USD from Newegg [newegg.com] or ZipZoomFly [zipzoomfly.com] you should definitely dig down deep and save a little money to buy one of these drives and experience the biggest performance and responsiveness improvement to your computer that you could imagine.
If you need a primer on the SSD revolution check out my previous post regarding the articles to read.
Required Reading for Solid State Drives (Score 1) [slashdot.org]
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I am extremely old fashioned in regards to hard drives. Not buying until something with normal price comes out from 2 vendors of mine, Seagate and Western Digital. They do storage for years.
Basically Intel is a CPU vendor/monopoly. Not a GPU vendor or a hard disk manufacturer.
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Intel makes chips.
Graphic cards have chips. Given, they don't necessarily pander to the high end.
Flash drives have chips. Intel can make chips.
Intel. Chips. Enjoy.
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"I dunno about this chip-based storage from the biggest chip manufacturer in the world. I'm gonna wait until a company that has never made Flash makes Flash-based storage instead."
Yeah, that makes total sense.
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IIRC some laptops will automatically set a hard disk password if you set a bios password.
What took them so long to report this? (Score:5, Informative)
Welcome to 2 weeks ago:
http://www.pcper.com/comments.php?nid=7544 [pcper.com]
Allyn Malventano
Storage Editor, PC Perspective
I've seen this bug before, sorta. (Score:3, Interesting)
Now the problem came in that case when you wanted to change/delete the password. It would use a second subroutine to do.
That last step was the killer, seems that someone had declared a global variable and a local variable with the same name. End result one overwrote the others data, and one never knew exactly what the box hashed, nor you could figure out what to key in to the screen to unlock the door. (so to speak.)
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Slashdot, I don't know how to say this nicely. (Score:2)
This news is days and days old, very old.
Anyone who cares knows about this, we've long since known! What we want to know now is when is the patch coming out, for existing owners and when will the god damned disks be going back on shelves?
There is going to be even more demand for the things, as soon as they are re-listed, prices are going to skyrocket at the retailers.
Also, on this note, it's August 4'th where I am right now, Windows 7 is available within about 72 hours internationally for certain MSDN subsc
Insufficient testing? (Score:3, Interesting)
Ask anyone who bought a JMicron-based SSD about insufficient testing. How any company thought that controller was worthy for their SSDs is beyond me.
Before I replaced mine with a Samsung SSD, my [censored] was regularly giving me studders and pauses that lasted for 20-40 seconds at a time. It just flat-out halted everything on the computer for half a minute for no apparent reason, even while reading, not just writing. Apparently, this was predominant behavior for the controller that dominated the SSD arena until the X-25 started blowing people away.
I think I understand now why Seagate, WD, and the other HD manufacturers are taking so long to get SSDs on the market. Since their market depends almost exclusively on storage, they can't afford to screw up their first SSDs. At least, I hope that's the reason. Even they have to understand that the hard drive market isn't going to last forever.
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Re:I find this disturbing (Score:5, Insightful)
Future? You must be new to computers. I updated the firmware in my very first 80's printer to give it more features. Had to pop out the old chips and put in the new ones. I upgraded the firmware in modems from several different manufacturers (some more than once) to add features and fix bugs. I've updated the firmware (BIOS) on most of my motherboards. I've updated the firmware on optical drives. I've updated the firmware on a scanner. I've updated the firmware on SCSI controllers. I've updated the firmware on hard drives. I've updated the firmware on switches and routers. Hell, I've updated the firmware on keyboards.
This is hardly a new phenomenon.
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Hehe.. .bis at some point.. Also remember upgrading TOS ROMs on my ST :D..
I remember updating my modem to support the
Re:I find this disturbing (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember updating the HARDWARE of my modem: Changing the swamping resistors to reduce the Q of the filters and broaden the passbands so the Rx side would work at 300 as well as the original 110 baud. B-)
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Aircraft (F-16 among others) flight control firmware has been updated by reprogramming UVPROMs for many years.
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'Did you apply the 0.23b firmware update? That problem's fixed in the latest betas...'
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I remember when firmware updates meant baking your chips in uv light and then plugging it into something you soldered on a perf-board and connected to the parallel port.
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No, we're looking at a past like that. Lest you forget, both the 486 and the Pentium had firmware updates too (the Pentium FDIV bug being the better remembered of the two.) My first firmware update was a bugfix in a 300 baud accoustic coupler, way back in 1983 or thereabouts.
Can't imagine why you think this is anything new; even video game consoles have been
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No, it is all about updating your wetware, and It has been anticipated that things will be much worse [philipkdick.com] a long long time ago.
CC.
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#1 8800GTX 512MB who in it's video bios claimed to only have 256MB. I guess the windows drivers had their own VRam enumeration procedure, but this majorly put other drivers off to a hang (OSX - yeha i know hackintosh is bad, and noveau). I had to get the vbios from the board, hexedit it (4 offsets), then flash it
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I got one to add that I'm still working on:
GTX 285 - hangs with blue/black screen of death both in idle and in games although far more frequently at idle, for some people it happens so early and often that a RMA is their only option. For me it happens within 3-5 days of bootup. What I think the problem is: the card is designed to throttle down when it's not being fully utilized, but I suspect the voltage regulators weren't designed to handle this, so even during full utilization when the BIOS runs at its de
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Normally, a good, supported modern device will eventually have bugs fixed with a firmware update. Companies can't really test millions of different configurations, usage patterns or a "one in the million" issue. Some companies like Apple have went beyond it and they would even ship "double click in gui" firmware updates. Of course, it is all fail safe.
I always pick hardware which *does have* firmware updates on site, with good documentation and release notes. For example, Lacie keeps updating their firewire
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Re:BIOS password on a disk? (Score:4, Informative)
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That would be why the ATA standard requires the data to be encrypted with AES, so removing the physical flash chips and attempting to read them would do no good without the encryption key and the data would only be in 512 byte blocks with some ECC code and with an unknown physical to logical mapping. Good luck on decrypting and reconstructing the contents of a 160GB drive 512 bytes at a time with an unknown and complex type of error checking code.
Re: (Score:1)
Here, let me google that for you: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=hard+disk+password [lmgtfy.com]