Crucial M4 SSDs Having Firmware Glitch at 5,000 Hours Of Use

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Crucial M4 SSDs Having Firmware Glitch at 5,000 Hours Of Use

Post by Apoptosis »

If you own a Crucial M4 SSD and are having issues with it then you might want to see how many hours are on it. It appears that users are having to reboot the system every hour. Check out what one user said on the

Crucial Support Forums:
I just started getting this error yesterday on my M4 128gb drive. I've had it for about 6 months or so. Basically I'd come home to Windows saying 0xc000000e and it's unable to boot. If I warm reset then I'd hit the same error, but if I power cycle then it would boot fine. After about 30 minutes or so I get a blue screen and the 0x000000F4 error.
That doesn't sound good and the thread started back on December 13th, 2011. Yesterday, it appears that Crucial has figured out the issue and has a firmware fix for it in the works:
We are aware of an issue that is currently affecting a small number of users whereby their m4 causes their system to require a restart. This issue occurs after approximately 5,000 hours of actual “on time” use. Following the initial reboot, the system then requires subsequent restarts after each additional hour of use. However, the data on the SSD is unaffected and will not be lost due to this condition. Once you hit the ~5000 hours of on time, the issue will happen regardless of how you use the drive.

Through our investigation, we have determined the root cause of the problem and will be releasing a firmware update that rectifies the situation. We are currently running through our validation and compatibility process. Once this process is complete, the firmware will be made available to our customers. Although we understand the desire of some people to start using unreleased firmware now, we want to ensure that our solution works across multiple chipsets, systems, and operating systems before publishing the release code. We are currently targeting the week of January 16th, 2012 to publicly release the new firmware update.

We understand the impact that this is having on some users right now and apologize for this inconvenience. We appreciate your continued support, feedback, and patience as we finalize code and resolve this issue.

Crucial Employee, US
and this later update:
We understand the desire of some people to start using unreleased firmware now, we want to ensure that our solution works across multiple chipsets, systems, and operating systems before publishing the release code. We are currently targeting the week of January 16th, 2012 to publicly release the new firmware update.



I apologize for the inconvenience.
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Re: Crucial M4 SSDs Having Firmware Glitch at 5,000 Hours Of

Post by FZ1 »

Crucial has issued a fix...
http://www.crucial.com/support/firmware.aspx
Revision Firmware 0309 is now available. This firmware resolves the issue where a m4 SSD required restarts after approximately 5,000 hours of actual “on time” use.

If you are using a SAS Expander please do not download this Firmware. We are working on a Firmware Update that will work in these applications. We do not have a ETA for this right now.

Release Date: 01/13/2012
Change Log:

Changes made in version 0002 (m4 can be updated to revision 0309 directly from either revision 0001, 0002, or 0009)
Correct a condition where an incorrect response to a SMART counter will cause the m4 drive to become unresponsive after 5184 hours of Power-on time. The drive will recover after a power cycle, however, this failure will repeat once per hour after reaching this point. The condition will allow the end user to successfully update firmware, and poses no risk to user or system data stored on the drive.

This firmware update is STRONGLY RECOMMENDED for drives in the field. Although the failure mode due to the SMART Power On Hours counter poses no risk to saved user data, the failure mode can become repetitive, and pose a nuisance to the end user. If the end user has not yet observed this failure mode, this update is required to prevent it from happening.

If you are using a SAS Expander please do not download this Firmware. As soon as we have a Firmware Update that will work in these applications we will release it.
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Re: Crucial M4 SSDs Having Firmware Glitch at 5,000 Hours Of

Post by FZ1 »

Update completed, was quick and painless although drive was empty so there was no back-up tasks to do.
0309-firmware.jpg
0309-firmware.jpg (33.59 KiB) Viewed 7888 times
Joe
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