Technical > PC Hardware Discussion/Reviews > Buggy Intel SSD 520 Series SSD Firmware

Buggy Intel SSD 520 Series SSD Firmware

said by sandfarce :

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Now users are having major issues with the failure of the SSD's SATA controller to properly respond to ATA Sleep/Wakeup and SATA Disconnect/Reconnect events. The result is bad context restoration and corruption of the drive state information resulting in a drive locked in a "panic mode" where the controller will fail to reset and the drive will no longer appear as a SATA device to the host.

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At this point, my suggestion (in my opinion) is to avoid any SSD that uses a Sandforce controller since the Sandforce controller has been plagued with firmware bugs for months.

Samsung, who recently released their new 840 and 840 Pro Series of SSDs runs their own firmware, their own in-house developed SSD controller, and their own in-house manufactured NAND Flash Chips have been showing great promise.

Myself, I got a 840 Series (not the Pro) with the TLC (Triple Level Cell) NAND and I hardly see the difference in performance.

I copied a file from of my HDDs over to the SSD, a rather large file, and write speeds were 130 MB/s according to Windows Explorer's File Copy Dialog. Decent performance if you ask me.

No, I don't work for Samsung!!!!
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Tom
Boycott AT&T uVerse! | Tom's Android Blog | AOKP (The Android Open Kang Project)

reply to trparky
Personally, I wouldn't worry about it too much. The guy in the post sounds like he knows what he is talking about but if you read between the lines, he doesn't have a clue.

I mean if your stuff is mission critical, you should have a backup structure in place to handle backups but look what he is saying in the post. Not to mention it sounds like he is using these drives in an enterprise environment which isn't this drive's target audience. The Sandforce controller does real time compression so I wouldn't be surprised the data on the LBAs to not correspond to what they would look like without compression. I am guessing the controller uses something similar to the LZW compression algorithm which is lossless.

Case in point, don't leave anything on any storage drive that you can't live without without a backup. So backup, backup and backup your data.

In my case, the drive itself was indeed dropping from the SATA channel.

For instance... this morning I awoke to find my computer with a black screen and a frightening error message. "No Boot Device Found"

So I pressed Control-Alt-Delete and went into BIOS, sure enough, the Intel SSD was completely MIA. Gone. Nowhere to be found. As far as the motherboard was concerned, it wasn't connected to the SATA port.

Only a cold boot would bring the SSD back from where ever it went.

Then, it happened a second time. I was browsing this site, I went to go make myself another cup of coffee this morning. Came back to the same "No Boot Device Found" error message.
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Tom
Boycott AT&T uVerse! | Tom's Android Blog | AOKP (The Android Open Kang Project)

So I did some troubleshooting. I moved the SSD from SATA port 0 to SATA port 1 which SATA port 1 had a Western Digital Black 2 TB HDD on it which I've never had a problem with at all on SATA port 1.

So simply put...
The SSD went from port 0 to port 1.
The HDD went from port 1 to port 0.
Basically a port swap and a cable swap too.

Same ugly "No Boot Device Found" error came up again.
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Tom
Boycott AT&T uVerse! | Tom's Android Blog | AOKP (The Android Open Kang Project)

Exercise your right to claim warranty, you have 5 years for the 520 series so use it wisely.

reply to trparky

reply to Chrno

reply to trparky
I have a Mushkin 240GB, (non-Deluxe) SATAIII that has the Sandforce 2281 controller. It's in AHCI single disk mode. Been running great for over a year now 24/7/365. Only restarted after power outage, or shut down for cleaning.

I have seen articles that recommend SSDs NOT be put into hibernation, or sleep, but I wasn't sure why.
Now, I think I know.

Sorry to hear about your bad experience with the Intel SSD. It may be in your best interest to disable "hibernate/sleep" with this drive. Might try it & see if this behavior stops.
Good luck. Hope you can resolve this issue!

It's a desktop so it never was hibernated or put to sleep.

reply to trparky

My Vertex 2 is still humming along nicely as well, but I think for my next drive, I will get either the OCZ Vector or the Samsung 840 Pro.
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Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

I have the 840 Series (not the Pro) since it was cheaper than the 840 Pro. The guy I bought it off of at Microcenter said that I wouldn't notice the performance difference. He was right.

reply to trparky
I'm confused, so help me understand. Quote:

Oh god, I think you're the one who works for Intel. Crap.

Narrowing down the fact that I believe that the SSD is the part that's failing is that none of the other devices that are connected to the same SATA ports and controller are having issues.

I have two HDDs and one SSD that are connected to the Intel SATA controller that's on my motherboard.

I went through the process of determining if the port is possibly what went bad. I tried the SSD on SATA Port 1 which another drive that has been known to not have any issues in this system of mine has been connected to for months with no issues. I plugged the SSD into that port, SATA Port 1, and that HDD into SATA Port 0 which effectively not only swapped the ports but also the SATA cables themselves. This revealed no change, I still had the SSD drop off the bus.
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Tom
Boycott AT&T uVerse! | Tom's Android Blog | AOKP (The Android Open Kang Project)

I did do some extra investigation into the issue that I was having, specifically reading the Windows Event Log.

OK, I'm give some information about my setup that I have along with the scheduled TRIM that I do nightly on the SSD. I have a Windows Scheduled Task scheduled to perform a TRIM on the SSD on a nightly basis at 3 AM in the morning. Those mornings that I found my computer sitting at the "No Boot Device Found" error had no Windows Event Log entries shortly after 3:05 AM. So that may indicate that the SSD failed, thus dropped off of the bus, shortly after the TRIM command was issued to the SSD.

This morning, I deleted almost 10 GBs of data off the SSD. Mainly temporary files, files that I downloaded and already did something with, etc. You know the kinds of files.

After I deleted those files I ran a manual TRIM via the Windows 8 "Defragment and Optimize Drives" tool. I then went to go get myself another cup of coffee, I then came back to my machine sitting at the "No Boot Device Found" error message.
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Tom
Boycott AT&T uVerse! | Tom's Android Blog | AOKP (The Android Open Kang Project)

It is interesting that the SSD failed and dropped off of the bus after I issued it a TRIM command. So that may indicate that something occurred in the SSD when the TRIM command was issued which triggered the SSD's controller chip to malfunction in some way which then caused the SSD to drop off of the bus.
--
Tom
Boycott AT&T uVerse! | Tom's Android Blog | AOKP (The Android Open Kang Project)

reply to trparky

Did you read my post about how the failure of the SSD seemed to coincide with an issue of the TRIM command to the SSD?