According to a post on its support forum, Intel has managed to reproduce the nasty bug that's been bricking SSDs. Intel replicated the issue on Windows 7 X64 with version 1.3 of the firmware upgrade tool and a 34nm X25-M SSD. The company has placed the bug as a high priority and will deliver a fix as soon as possible.

Read the whole story

At least they were able to replicate the issue and take steps towards issuing a fix for this. SSD hard drives though IMO aren't worth the cost premium as (a) the speed differentials are minimal versus a standard HD and (b) capicity is no where near what we have in desktops right now. Still, kudos to Intel for being proactive on this one.

Do you think Intel's X58's till come down in price? They seem great but $$$. Still out of my range.

It is good to see Intel is trying to address the issue, especially given the price of their drives.
I think SSDs are worth the money in certain situations, where you need super fast read speeds but don't require large storage space, or you just want a silent, cool running experience and have a spare $1K+. I am waiting for the prices to come down and sizes to get to 500GB+(at a reasonable price). I use a lot of virtual machines which take up space. A friend has 4 SSDs in a raid configuration and applications load before lifting the finger off the button. A large document will save without the user seeing a status bar. This is why people are willing to pay the premium. Me I would love to have a laptop with raided SSDs.

SSDs are getting better and cheaper but all these bugs and reports of performance fading over time makes me want to wait a couple years before I upgrade to one. By then hopefully the prices will start to rival traditional HDDs.

I think SSDs are still a loooong way before mainstream use. Perhaps the smaller size is better for storing just the the systems OS? Would this really make the difference even if all other programs and such are on a separate drive?

Great to see Intel taking steps to remedy the situation. The X25 was such a well received device by reviewers and is probably one of the more popular devices with customers.

So hopefully not many people were effected by this and Intel helps them get there data back or replace the drives for them.

Yes SSD are a toy for the rich right now, we don't need these for the time being, uless all bugs are resolved and prices are dropped to campare those of SATA.

Also it will be of no benefit to put the OS on a small SSD and everything else o a conventional HDD, that just doesn't make sense, as SSD are here to get rid of the seek time and that will not be gone by this way....

A lot of times its hard to replicate a bug, the fact that they did means they are able to fix it quickly. Hard ware can be so complicated, things break for no clear reason. I would hope to the price comes down at least a little...pretty please.

I think such hybrid configurations definitely see a boost in boot up times, like we saw in the Microsoft demonstrations.Plus if u have all your programs and OS on and ssd you might see your others tasks speed up as well and leave all the dirt cheap mechanical drives to be consumed by your media library

Wow, they still haven't fixed this?

Hasn't this been a problems for like months or something?

I'm still using the beta version and have been since just about day 1. I've had only very minor issues, but feel W7 is about as good as it gets! I'll buy a full version of 64bit home premium ASAP.

SSD are amazingly fast right off the shelf. Sure it's a bit pricy, but save the wasted money on 8G of RAM which you're probably not even using half. It's not $1k like everyone keeps claiming.

And why do people keep putting them in raid? The SSD is already near the bus capacity anyway.

Any why do you need 500GB of high speed storage. Use a HD for your bulk storage and save the SSD for the stuff that matters. Unless you're going to play a video at 1000x speed, you don't need it on your SSD.

And no, SSDs aren't for you if you mind waiting for apps to load. But if you like Excel to open in under a second, reboots to take less than 40seconds, Visual Studio to load in under 5 seconds, Matlab in under 2 seconds...then ya...its nice to have.

Intel promised a firmware update by the end of November. It is now Nov 30 at the end of the day, and I'm still hoping. I've been holding off on upgrading from Vista to Windows 7 64 bit. My X25-M drive also seems to be getting slower, so I probably need to run the Trim command to speed things up. What is the hold up??

Good news. Intel today just released the long awaited firmware update.

the released an updated firmware update but the toolbox hasn't been re-released. I have a download of the original toolbox but I haven't wanted to use it after all the problems with the firmware update.