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According to this thread on Crucial's site, the M4 has a firmware bug that bricks the drive after ~5200 hours of operation. If anybody was an early adopter and runs 24x7 or near to it, you'll be approaching that figure. Might only affect the 64GB model.

http://forums.crucial.com/t5/Solid-Stat ... 298#M23632

Crucial have acknowledged the issue here and plan a fix sometime after Jan 16.:
http://forums.crucial.com/t5/Solid-Stat ... 92/page/15

Intel, Sandforce and Marvell have all had bugs. Hell even mechanical drives still get them (hello Seagate). And despite what the slack-jawed knuckle-draggers rabbited on about, I much prefer the way OCZ dealt with the Sandforce bug than the Ostrich mentality adopted by others. If you know, you can prepare. If you don't know, you're screwed.

According to Crucial it doesn't brick the drive or lose the data.

Crucial wrote:

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.

Where did the bricking info come from?

My mistake

LiamC wrote:

Intel, Sandforce and Marvell have all had bugs. Hell even mechanical drives still get them (hello Seagate). And despite what the slack-jawed knuckle-draggers rabbited on about, I much prefer the way OCZ dealt with the Sandforce bug than the Ostrich mentality adopted by others. If you know, you can prepare. If you don't know, you're screwed.

Amen brother.

The new 0309 firmware for the m4's has been released, FYI:

http://www.crucial.com/support/firmware.aspx

So I have a 256GB brand new M4. I bought it as a Sata III drive and set it up on my Asus P8P67 pro as such. It runs fine as a boot drive on Port 2. However the firmware ISO won't detect Sata III drives!!!

Why make a drive with this feature and then set up software that cant find a drive using it? Really sad. Crucial's support seems very poor - judging by their web site and "Crucial Dude's" single comment on this issue. The details are really few, unclear and Mac oriented only. (Hold the Option Button.)

Work arounds include sticking the disk in another box with Sata II - or I though I could plug it into a Sata II port. But why would the manufacturer create software that couldn't support a key feature of the drive. Very odd. Good product (mostly - or at least so far - 3 days) - but improved support is called for big time.

BAH! My M4 started crashing today! I'll try the firmware update when I get to work tomorrow.

Well, no more crashing / freezing after the firmware update. Yay!

Well, I have to say it is the worst firmware update program I have ever used.

1. Claims to be an ISO. = is not. is a ZIP file that has to be extracted.
2. Does not boot under SATA 3 AHCI mode = requires you to return to IDE MODE
3. LINUX does not recognize your graphics card. You must disable and return to on board graphics.
4. Finally, if FX$#&^*^ up your MBR record on the computer you are using.

Other than these gems. the firmware worked great.

I emailed customer support and was told this:

I am also sorry to hear that you are having issues with our Firmware page and if this is simply the reason you are looking to return the drive then you can follow the link below to our Firmware page and if you follow the instructions step by step you shouldn't have any further issues:

Wait, your solution to your FIRMWARE program being complete crap is to direct me to your FIRMWARE page.....and my complaint should be magically solved? Really? Someone really wrote that?

Morons.

I wrote a detailed explanation of how their firmware update was behaving badly and got no response.

I called and asked for a RMA exchange for SSD with the FIRMWARE update installed.

THEY SENT ME A SSD WITH THE PREVIOUS FIRMWARE WITH A STICKER INFORMING ME OF THE IMPORTANT FIRMWARE REQUIRED TO KEEP THE SSD FROM FAILING 100% of the time.

Holy crap. You think that when you have a 100 % failure, you would have a program in place to handle it.

Guess not.

Crucial is off my list.

Ugh. That's too bad; I've generally been quite happy with Crucial (and Micron) products in the past.

FWIW my main beef with Corsair's firmware update mechanism was that it is Windows-only. No Linux version or option for an OS-less firmware upgrade (e.g. bootable ISO). A little inconvenient for us Linux users...

You don't have to switch to IDE mode. That's from the old instructions. All I had to do on my P8P67 was disable the sata 3 controllers in the bios and it found my drive. Didn't even have to move the sata port it was in (I guess the ports default to 2.0 when 3.0 is disabled???)

Lastly, how on earth can you say you preferred OCZ's handling of the sandforce bug? They pretended it didn't exist for 6 months. Crucial patched this in less than 2 weeks. This isn't like insider info here. Put forth a little effort and you'll find yourself bitching about a lot fewer things in life.

You don't have to switch to IDE mode. That's from the old instructions. All I had to do on my P8P67 was disable the sata 3 controllers in the bios and it found my drive. Didn't even have to move the sata port it was in (I guess the ports default to 2.0 when 3.0 is disabled???)

There seems to be a great deal of variation depending on MB and BIOS.

I couldn't get it to work in any configuration on the intended machine.

What I learned was from a second rig that I did get it to work on. Reading the forum, there seems to be a great deal of this. (Various results based on MB)

I understand the combinations and permutations are endless. Hence, my surprise that they didn't have a back-up plan to deal with the situation for people who were unsuccessful with their limited instructions FIRMWARE.


PS, I had updated the same SSD from Firmware 2 to Firmware 9...So however they changed their Firmware software for the version 309 caused the problem...
That and 34 pages of problems on their support forum should have given them a clue....But customer service acted like I was the first to complain....

Did not make me happy.

Don't know why you had problems... I upgraded 2 M4's, one in laptop (old Sager model, don't remember chipset) and one in my PC (Z68-based mobo), both times I didn't have to disable AHCI (or do any changes to SATA configs) in BIOS.

I suspect it is designed to work with INTEL or MS drivers and did not like the AMD drivers I was using....just a guess.

AM 3 = no go:

MSI 890GXM-G65
• Supports USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gb/s

Worked with

Asrock 890GX Pro3 with above mentioned changes.

Derfer wrote:

You don't have to switch to IDE mode. That's from the old instructions. All I had to do on my P8P67 was disable the sata 3 controllers in the bios and it found my drive. Didn't even have to move the sata port it was in (I guess the ports default to 2.0 when 3.0 is disabled???)

Lastly, how on earth can you say you preferred OCZ's handling of the sandforce bug? They pretended it didn't exist for 6 months. Crucial patched this in less than 2 weeks. This isn't like insider info here. Put forth a little effort and you'll find yourself bitching about a lot fewer things in life.

I didn't have to change a single thing with a P8P67-M Pro. Left SATA 3 enabled. Extracted ISO from Zip, burned image, booted image, typed "yes", done.

Flawless upgrade experience on an ICH10/X58 (Asus BIOS) and on the C600/X79 (Asus UEFI). No settings had to be changed.

Looking at the disc, Micron uses ISOLINUX to initialize a 2.88MB IMG file (presumably some flavor of DOS).

The above Wiki notes that ISOLinux is not universally supported due to BIOS problems.

Could be an MSI problem. I've never been much impressed with the MSI firmware team and they don't seem to have improved.