Is 320 firmware buggy?

Furthermore, why would a person be constantly power-cycling one of these devices?  It's important to note the article says they're power-cycling the device (either hooking it up to a PSU with a manual switch, or are yanking the SATA power cable repetitively), which is very different from stand-by (DIPM).

If this is true -- a bug is a bug, no argument from me there, and it should be fixed.  But the criteria for this happening seems a bit excessive.

Dosen't the toolbox say to power cycle the SSD in order to secure erase?

Goose wrote:

 

I suppose, but I upgraded to 320 because of built-in capacitors (I'm not using a laptop and I don't have a UPS). Kind of defeats the purpose if it can't shut itself down properly in the event of power failure.

That's not how I read the description of the problem at all.  I read the description to mean that repetitive power-cycling of the SSD -- which I interpret as "continually powering the device on, then powering it off, then powering it on, then powering it off" -- resulted in the drive reporting a total capacity of 8MBytes.

The exact quote: "We had an SSD 320 600GB 2.5" SATA drive in for evaluation from our Intel rep. I was able to kill it in two or three hours by power cycling it."

"I was able to kill it in 2 or 3 hours by power cycling it", to me, means the guy sat around power-cycling it constantly for 2-3 hours.  Let's say he did this for 2-3 hours at 10 second intervals.  3 * 60 * 60 = 10800 seconds.  A power-cycle requires both the power-off and power-on cycle, so 20 seconds total.  10800 / 20 = 540 power cycles over the course of 3 hours.

This is what happens when people who write damning articles don't take the time to write verbosely what they were doing.  Without those details, people have to speculate.  I can point the world to a thouand different devices which will fail/freak out when continually power-cycled.  How often are users power-cycling (again: NOT putting the device in stand-by/sleep mode (DIPM)!  That isn't the same as a power-cycle) their SSDs?  Are you power-cycling yours as often as this guy is?

Sigh.

Relic wrote:

 

Dosen't the toolbox say to power cycle the SSD in order to secure erase?

It doesn't say to power-cycle the SSD repetitively for 2-3 hours.

koitsu wrote:

 

Relic wrote:

 

Dosen't the toolbox say to power cycle the SSD in order to secure erase?

 

It doesn't say to power-cycle the SSD repetitively for 2-3 hours.

Actually, a friend brought his 320 SSD for me to help him secure erase it. We power cycled it at least a dozen times and the toolbox would never SE it. We tried Parted Magic w/ Hd erase several times power cycling each time and still never unlocked it. So, no we didn't do it for 2-3 houts. Probably only one.

And, I thought this forum was to get help answering legitimate questions about issues about SSDs , not to receive smart alec answers.

From the quote: "when the power failure is happening, the SSD device tries to reconnect with the SATA port instead of initiating a proper shutdown."

It seems like he is discribing an improper shutdown due to power loss and not a standard power down.  I wished that poster defined what he was doing so it could be replicated.  To me, 2-3 hours of power loss cycling seems like an odd test.

I have foward this discussion to Intel.

I have had the same problem with the fellow a few posts above, I was installing a game on my 80G intel 320 and somehow everything froze up and couldn't do anything so I reset the system and before I knew it I kept getting the  dreaded cannot find "bootmgr" on the main drive, so I switched to my old velociraptor 300g tried to revive the intel SSD but kept getting the BAD_CTX 8m reading on the crystaldiskinfo.

Someone mentioned about waiting the end of July but you see we are dealing with expensive equipment here, Intel should've thought ahead of time to prevent goof ups like this happenning before they even released the drives series 320, firmware bugs and all that is a lame excuse.

That drive cost me $199 and it's only one week old.