New Intel X-25M SSDs on Hold: Firmware Problem
July 25, 2009 by Rico Mossesgeld
Filed under 12
You may have heard about Intel coming out with new SSDs. This X25-M upgrade represents the same capacities (80GB and 160GB) at much lower prices ($225 from $595 and $440 from $945 respectively), not to mention better reading speeds (”a 25 percent reduction in read latency”). Personally, this development made me hopeful that pretty soon we’ll see $200 320GB solid state drives.
Courtesy Intel
But Intel discovered a hiccup with the new drives, asking retailers to put all deliveries on hold, and to actually pull the X25-Ms from their respective store fronts. William George of Puget Systems narrates what happened:
After several hours of waiting on Intel’s tech folks I am now pleased to be able to relay to our customers the status of the Intel drives. There is a defect in the units which causes data corruption if – and only if – a password is set on the drive in the system BIOS… and then changed or disabled later. Initially we were told this might require a complete reworking of the drives, and that those we had gotten in were effectively unusable, but Intel was able to work out a firmware fix for the problem. That won’t be available immediately, but should be showing up in about two weeks.
Ultimately not a big disaster—especially since Intel was able to catch the problem relatively quickly, probably before customers were able to discover it for themselves.
In any case, for those who already have an X25-M, George was helpful enough to share a link to the updated firmware, available here.
More about the new SSDs: Intel’s new 34nm SSDs cut prices by 60 percent, boost speed
