- Tuesday, 9 February 2010
- INQ Mobile
- RSS
A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something - Frank Capra
Intel halts SSD shipments
RUMOUR HAS IT that Intel is pulling the plug on shipments of its second generation SSD's (Solid State Drives) for a couple of weeks.
The drives use a 34nm Flash NAND fabrication process and punters have been getting very excited about it.
However it appears there is a problem with data corruption. Suppliers are talking about postponed shipments of the drives pending a firmware update. E-tailers have pulled the drives from their ordering systems until the update has been installed on all the drives.
The corruption comes from an error when a user sets a password in the BIOS for their drive. If the user changes or removes the password the drive becomes corrupted and useless.
The error does not occur if the user does not set a BIOS password on the drive so Intel has advised their current SSD customers not to create, remove, or change passwords on their SSDs.
Still the problem is deeply embarrassing to Chipzilla, which wanted big things for its new line of SSDs. Two weeks is a long time in IT and Intel's SSD brand could acquire a tarnish that might take a while to wear off. µ
Note - This article has been updated to reflect the fact that the SSDs are fabbed at 34nm rather than 32nm as initially reported. The Inquirer regrets the mishtake.
Share this:
ShareBusiness Intelligence Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Enterprise Accounting Software
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Enterprise Systems Management
2 week must be a long time at the inquirer also, because it looks like Intel has managed to shrink its 34nm flash chips down to 32nm according to your headline.. Quite a feat..Maybe Intels image will not be as tarnished after all :)
i heard that it was halted because there were not enough customers to pay the massive £50 per GB pricetag!
They are available starting from today (at least here in Finland). I know people from Germany who also already got their drive.
When it comes to the euro/gigabyte, the new 34 nm drives are the cheapest good performer around.
who is this ponce and how is he a tech writer? does he not even read his own site enough to know Intel is selling 34nm drives. DOH! Warning, reading the INQ in its current state can lead to severe brain damage. Get a grip Inquirer!
£50/GB? I'm not sure which retailers you're looking at, but I can't see any stupid enough to try to charge £8,000 for these drives. The cost is about £2/GB, which while high compared to conventional hard disks, the performance is equivalently higher also (between 10-30x depending on the type of workload). They're also much more robust, silent, draw less power, run cooler, work over a wider temperature range and don't slow down noticeably when files get fragmented.
Expect to see PCs moving towards two tier storage, with an SSD for fast primary storage and HDs for slower bulk storage.
At least you did the right thing. OCZ continues to sell SSD drives that are known faulty and refuses to acknowledge the problem.
You did the right thing on this one, even though this bug is localized to the a BIOS password being set.
Wish others manufactures would have this level of respect for their customers.
Compare this to Microsoft shipping a pre-alpha OS as if it where a final release, and then using consumers as testers to find the thousands of bugs.
intel have so much respect for their customers they have been fined record amounts in every continent except the Americas for price fixing, anti-competitive behaviour and generally being a long, long way short of showing respect to anybody.
They pulled these because data corruption can lead to huge lawsuits and for no other reason.