BSOD bug hits Crucial m4 SSDs


by Geoff Gasior — 4:07 PM on January 6, 2012

As I said in our last big SSD round-up, the inconvenient truth about solid-state storage is that it still has reliability problems. Every major SSD maker seems to have been affected by one issue or another, and the SandForce BSOD bug proved particularly stubborn through most of last year. The blue screen of death has hit again, but this time, it's Crucial's m4 SSDs that are affected. The company's forums detail numerous reports a 0x00000f4 BSOD error popping up on users' systems.

Crucial has confirmed the bug, which apparently rears its head after about 5,000 hours of disk "on time." According to Crucial, rebooting will return an affected machine to normal operation, but only briefly: "the system then requires subsequent restarts after each additional hour of use." Ugh.

Although Crucial claims to have determined the cause of the problem, a firmware update to fix it isn't due until the week of January 16. The company is adamant that users aren't at the risk of data loss due to the bug, though. I'd recommend that anyone with an m4 make a backup of the drive's contents just in case.

This news is certainly disappointing, and we'll be sure to grill Crucial when we meet with them next week at the Consumer Electronics show. I can't help but find some irony in the fact that the m4, a drive we've been recommending as an alternative to folks turned off by the SandForce BSOD bug, now has one of its own.

   
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