14 DAY TRIAL // A series of consumers who have bought Intel 320-series solid state drives have reported that the units are affected by a strange firmware issue that causes these SSDs to drop in capacity to just 8MB and lose all the data that is stored on them.
320-series SSD owners who are affected by these issues started a thread on Intel's official support forums to complain about the problems, but no official response has been provided at this time.
These problems were first spotted by the PC Review publication, which wrote:
“Be wary of the new Intel SSD 320 series. Currently, there's a bug in the controller that can cause the device to revert to 8MB during a power failure. AFAIK they have not yet publicly announced it, and won't have a firmware fix ready for release until the end of July.” According to an Intel representative, these issues can be triggered by power failures as the SSD tries to reconnect with the SATA port instead of starting a proper shutdown.
So far, there is still no clear solution for this problem, but some users have reported that drive space can be restored by performing a secure erase with the help of Intel's SSD Toolbox utility.
A new firmware that is supposed to resolve these issues is expected by the end of the month, but Intel hasn't made any official statements in this regard.
Intel's 320 SSD Series is comprised of six models with capacities ranging from 40GB to 600GB and all these drives use the SATA 3Gbps interface.
Their performance varies according to drive capacity, but the fastest SSDs are able to reach sequential read and write speeds of 270MB/s and 220MB/s, respectively, as well as 39,500 input/output operations per second (IOPS) random reads and 23,000 IOPS random writes.
Since the second half of May, the drives are backed up by one of the largest warranties in the industry which spans over no less than five years. (via SweClockers)