14 DAY TRIAL // Intel has recently confirmed that it is well aware of the firmware issue that affects their 320-series solid state drives and promised to release an update regarding this problem once more information is available.
About a month ago, some 320-series SSD owners started reporting that power failures caused their drives to drop in capacity to just 8MB and lose all the data that was stored on them.
These problems appear to be triggered by the fact that, after a power loss, the SSD tries to reconnect with the SATA port instead of starting a proper shutdown.
After a fair number of customers complained about this issue on Intel's official support forums, a company employee, that works for the Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group, responded in a post:
“Intel is aware of the customer sightings on Intel SSD 320 Series. If you experience any issue with your Intel SSD, please contact your Intel representative or Intel customer support (via web: www.intel.com or phone: www.intel.com/p/en_US/support/contact/phone). We will provide an update when we have more information.” Intel hasn't said anything about the possible release of a firmware fix for the drives, and hasn't mentioned if this problem is cased only by a bug in the firmware, or if the hardware is also to blame.
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.