Intel Fixes 320 Series SSD Firmware at Last

The 320 series of solid state drives from Intel may finally step out of the age where almost all capacity gets lost and into one where its many gigabytes can actually be used for what they were intended.

The good impression that Intel made when it released the third generation 320 Series solid state drives is one that abruptly suffered critical existence failure shortly after launch.

The reason for this is a so-called 'Bad Context 13x error,' which causes most of the data on the product to be lost as if it had never been there.

What this means in layman terms is that the capacity of the units had a tendency to suddenly drop to 8 MB and stay there.

The causes identified for the appearance of the error are unexpected power cuts to the system “under specific conditions,” as discussed on the Communities site and other web forum topics.

Needless to say, customers were none so thrilled, especially after getting so enthusiastic about the price drop (compared to the previous SSD generations).

Back in the second half of July, the Santa Clara, California-based IT giant promised that it would release a firmware update to address the issue.

Now, that firmware update may have finally been completed, the company having entered the final testing stages of the software.

In the company's own words, according to this particular web page, “the new firmware update is in final validation testing and is targeted for release on Intel Communities within the next two weeks.”

In the meantime, customers can utilize the Intel SSD Toolbox, or other tools, to perform a secure erase that will restore the drive to an operational state.

Once this total deletion is done, getting the firmware as soon as possible (whenever it shows up) is highly recommended.

Fortunately, a secure erase is not actually mandatory for the firmware update itself, so those with more patience have at least this much of a reason to get more optimistic.