Content in Intel Communities

Intel SSD Reliability

webadmin@intel.com — Sun, 08 Jul 2012 10:26:13 GMT

This is a note to address several articles I have come across lately that state intel's reputation for quality and reliability in the SSD market as if it is a given. These comments are from my personal experience with intel's drives. I have owned 3 intel solid state drives, one X25-M G1, and two X25-M G2's. The X25-M G1 failed after 2 years while one of the G2 drives failed after 2.5 years. Now, I am not an expert on MTBF and reliability, but in my opinion this is a pretty poor track record. It is entirely possible that this is a coinicidence, however both drives failed in the same manner, from the same problem (determined by a third party data recovery specialist): Bad NAND flash.

As best I understand it as it was descibed by the company that analyzed these failed drives, a block of NAND flash either went bad or became inaccessible by the controller rendering the drives useless and unable to be accessed by normal means of hooking it up to a SATA or USB port. Two drives, different NAND (50 nm for the G1 and 34 nm for the G2), same failure mode.

Once again, this is not definitive, just my observations but to me, I think review sites need to be a little more cautious about how they qualify intel's reputation for quality and reliability because from my perspective, intel has neither and I have since began using crucial SSD's. Hopefully, I will see much longer life from these new drives.

I am also very disappointed with intel's supposed 3 year manufacturer's warranty. With the X25-M G2 drive that failed, it had been 2.5 years and since I had the G1 drive replaced under the limited warranty, I thought the second would also be covered. When I called intel and gave them the drives identification number they said "they could not pull it up in the system" and thus could not replace it. I asked what they meant by not being able to pull it up and they said they could only replace retail drives, not OEM drives. To me, if you manufacture a product, and then stamp your name on it as intel does, you should stand by your product regardless of whether it is for the retail channel or the oem channel. So my final message to intel is this: If you want to boast about your reputation for quality and reliability, then have the guts to stand by your product and make it right for the consumer when there is a problem. As far as I am concerned, you will not get the opportunity to leave this consumer out in the cold ever again.

Intel X25-M G1 Drive Will Not Boot Anymore

webadmin@intel.com — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 05:54:02 GMT

I have an intel X25-M G1 with the 8820 firmware that my wife used in her laptop. She has windows vista home basic 32 bit installed and one morning she was surfing the internet and she started to experience intermittent "hangs" in the OS. After a while, the computer flashed a black screen up that said that the hard drive was no longer bootable. After trying multiple restarts, the system would not let me get anywhere, it would not even give a message that there was no drive, or that there was no partition or that the drive would not boot, the bios would POST then I would just get a black screen with a blinking cursor in the top left corner.

I took a look in the bios and it still detects the drive. I booted into Parted Magic from the UBCD and I managed to mount the drive but I really don't know what I am doing in there enough to even browse around for any files. All I managed to do was run a diagnostic that said my drive was fine....which it wasn't because I still could not boot up.

I tried putting the dive into my desktop using a spare SATA connection but then my PC would not boot into my OS. It would hang at the windows splash screen forever. I tried booting into safe mode but it hangs at disk.sys, which means whatever is trying to load after that was causing a problem. At this point I am running out of ideas. My wife has a lot of very important files on that drive and I am wondering if anyone has any other ideas to try and recover the data from this X25-M.

Thanks!

X25-M 80GB G2 and Nvidia 680i

webadmin@intel.com — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 01:09:57 GMT

I just wanted to share my experience with using the new intel 80gb x25-m G2 with an older platform like the 680i. The drive I obtained was the 7mm without the spacer and it came with the 02G9 firmware. The first thing I wanted to do was install the new 02HD firmware. I was a little worried about this process becuase my board does not support AHCI mode. I should note that I have the EVGA 680i and at this point I was on the P32 bios. I downloaded the ISO from intel that had the new firmware and burned it to a CD on a separate machine. In the bios on my 680i I set the boot priority to boot from CD-ROM and saved and exited. The update process worked like a charm without any problems and the X25 firmware was successfully flashed to 02HD.

Next I decided to get the latest bios for my board. I had an alienware board which is not friendly with the stock EVGA bios. However, you can override the serial number check by downloading the P33 bios from EVGA and burning it to a CD. Go through the normal bios update procedure and when the flash tool kicks you out saying "the board numbers do not match" or something like that, it will dump you to what looks like an old DOS prompt. Override the check and force the bios flash with the following command line switches:

AWDFLASH.EXE NF68P33.bin /py/sn/cc /f /ld

Anyway, this is just a side note for anybody out there with a 680i from alienware because they won't allow this trick to be posted on their forums. Now that I had the latest bios, the latest firmware on my X25 and a copy of Win7 Pro x64, I went ahead with the standard windows clean install. This process also went off without a hitch. Once windows was booted up for the first time, I noticed that windows DID NOT do what it said it would do with a clean install on SSD's. Posts from tomshardware note that by default, on an SSD, win 7 should disable prefetch, superfetch, readyboost, and defrag. This was not the case and I had to do all this manually. Basically I followed the Vista SSD guide posted on the OCZ forums. Lastly, I went into device manager to check under ATAPI devices to see what driver was being used. Sure enough it was the standard PCI dual channel IDE controller driver that supposedly supports TRIM. I'm not sure how to test if TRIM is working, but other posts on this forum seem to indicate that either PCIIDE.sys or the AHCI standard driver support TRIM.

I also went a step further and setup 3x250GB seagate drives in a RAID 5 array. I only enabled RAID for the ports that these 3 drives were plugged into. I did not make any modifications in the bios that would tamper with my X25. Once I set up the RAID array and went into windows, I had to use the windows disk manager under administrative tools in the control panel to format the array and get windows to recognize it, but this went without issue. I think I got one message that said "this drive could not be formatted" but it must have been a glitch because it went ahead and formatted the drives and they work perfectly.

This is my experience with the new X25 G2 on the 680i platform. I hope this helps anyone out there who is considering upgrading an older platform.
I just wanted to share my experience with using the new intel 80gb x25-m G2 with an older platform like the 680i. The drive I obtained was the 7mm without the spacer and it came with the 02G9 firmware. The first thing I wanted to do was install the new 02HD firmware. I was a little worried about this process becuase my board does not support AHCI mode. I should note that I have the EVGA 680i and at this point I was on the P32 bios. I downloaded the ISO from intel that had the new firmware and burned it to a CD on a separate machine. In the bios on my 680i I set the boot priority to boot from CD-ROM and saved and exited. The update process worked like a charm without any problems and the X25 firmware was successfully flashed to 02HD.

AWDFLASH.EXE NF68P33.bin /py/sn/cc /f /ld

This is my experience with the new X25 G2 on the 680i platform. I hope this helps anyone out there who is considering upgrading an older platform.