Worked fine for me on Win7x64, Dell D620 laptop.  Win7 did re-install the drive at first boot after firmware update.  The disk drive drivers are unchanged (disk.sys and partmgr.sys, versions as originally installed with Win7 RC).  The 82801 GBM/GHM (ICH-7 family) southbridge SATA controller drivers also appear to be the versions associated with the Win7 RC build.  Ditto the ATA channel drivers, ataport.sys and atapi.sys.  Ditto the PCI Express rootport driver, pci.sys.  However, I notice that the SSD was assigned a new hardware ID at the firmware update.  So, I conclude that SSD re-install at first boot following the update simply re-installed the original drivers (i.e., no driver change).

I am not suggesting that this was the case for other platforms, just reporting what I see in device manager following the update in my particular case.  Based upon this, however, I would suggest that those with failing drives might check the associated device drivers to make sure that the original drivers were used for the re-install of the SSD at the re-boot following the update.  Those drivers should indicate the Windows 7 build (e.g., "7100" and "RC" in my case) in the driver name, for Microsoft-supplied drivers.

Other than that, I have no clue about the failures.

Best,

Bruce

If this is of any help, I flashed 26/10/09 after reading the Anandtech article.

Win 7 64-bit Pro

Asus P5Q Pro with Q6600 O/C to 3GHz - 2102 bios

4Gb RAM

1 80GB SSD as main boot

1 640GB SATA drive

Running AHCI - both during flash and after.

Flash install was fine, rebooted and new drivers installed message.

Reboot fine and subsequently have rebooted several times including fully switching the system off.

Still to do - create new ghost image and re-image back.

One question - as I had already installed Win 7 Pro before updating drive firmware to enable trim, will trim just start working?  i.e what about the data already on the drive which had been created/deleted before the new firmware?

My 80GB G2 SSDs also went bad, after a few restarts.

I have 3 of them in a raid 0 on an Adaptec 5805 SAS RAID Controller. After 2-3 restarts i got a "disk read error", and after another restart the controller lost the array completly!

I couldnt even initialise the drives to create another array!

Now i am trying to secure erase the drives to at least create another array!

the most important question being: WILL A FIXED FIRMWARE UPDATE MAKE THE DRIVES WORK AGAIN, OR WILL I HAVE TO SEND THEM IN?

I spent >550€ on them, and i am deeply dissapointed now.

Kind of confusing what Intel says about the Optimizer and Toolbox. Seems like there is no need to run the Optimizer if using Windows 7 and Microsoft AHCI driver, but...

When using the latest Microsoft Windows* 7 operating system with Microsoft AHCI storage drivers the OS will contain native support to execute the Intel® SSD Optimizer on an Intel SSD without requiring any user interaction.

Microsoft Windows* 7
Microsoft* AHCI
Native OS support (Intel® SSD Toolbox not required)

FYI - Looks Intel recommends scheduling the Optimizer to run daily...

"TRIM will be available natively to users of Windows 7, but not to users of Vista or XP. The new optimizer toolbox also being released today, however, gives users the ability to execute the commands manually to optimize their drives The Toolbox also makes it possible to schedule and run the Optimizer automatically, which Intel recommends be run once a day to ensure maximum performance."

http://hothardware.com/Articles/Intel-34nm-X25M-Gen-2-SSD-Performance-Update/?page=2

I understand your point about native support.  This may be for pre-Windows7 operating systems or other environments which don't offer native support. Consider the following:

"The Toolbox also features a graphical user interface that will allow end users to schedule and run the Trim command independent of the operating system."

"Not only will Windows 7 users receive the performance enhancements of the Trim command, but so will our Windows XP and Vista users," said Pete Hazen, director of marketing, Intel NAND Solutions Group.

Thanks for the response.

The question is will INTEL recompense all the users? It is more than a shame, having payed a fortune for something not properly working, and worse, supply a FIX which makes it even worse.

Embarising!!