It took them a bit longer than expected but Intel has finally issued a fix for that pesky bricking problem affecting their second generation solid-state drives. As previously reported, an October firmware update (revision 02HA) was supposed to improve performance by taking advantage of Windows 7's TRIM functionality, but instead left many 34nm X25-M owners with disk read errors and an otherwise inoperable drive.
If you were among the lucky ones who were able to update without a hassle, not only did your drive get TRIM support, but also an instant 40 percent performance boost on the sequential write speeds of 160GB models. For everyone else the new 02HD firmware and version 1.5 update tool should finally bring your drive up to par.
Intel's 80GB X25-M drive was among the top performers in our first SSD roundup months ago, but sadly their improved G2 series has been met with a few problems since launch. Before this latest issue cropped up, Intel had to halt shipments because of another data corruption problem related to the BIOS password settings.