Curse

TheGizzy · Feb 27, 2012, 10:44 PM // 22:44

I hope it's ok for me to post this here, but given that I sent some 36 hours (and dozens of Google searches) trying to diagnose & fix the issue... and given that it seems as if there is almost no information ABOUT the issue on the web, I thought a heads up here might be of use.

A lot of us with newer systems especially are going for SSDs, and the Crucial M4 64Gb SSD seems to be extremely popular - I've already found five people who have them among those I know.

There is a bug in the firmware which causes a hard crash once the drive has been in use for 5200 hours. Once that crash happens, the drive will crash every hour of uptime from then on. In other words, you can boot the system and one hour later it will crash. Boot...wait an hour...crash. Like clockwork.

You'd think it'd be easy to Google the issue and find a solution - but unless you KNOW it's your Crucial SSD causing it, good luck. And the BSOD error it kicks off (assuming you get one/can see it) is the singularly most common - and useless - BSOD error known to man: 0x000000F4

After weeks of denying it was their problem, Crucial finally kicked out a firmware update in January. It's an easy fix, and should not cause any data loss. Obviously, it's always a good idea to backup your data before applying a firmware update like this.

The firmware update can be found here: http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-St...p/80282#M24370

Since there are a lot of people likely tossing together new rigs in anticipation of GW2, I wanted to put this out there. Don't get me wrong - I love my SSD... it's smokin' fast, and a reasonable price, which is why it's so popular.

But finding out what was wrong this time has to be the single most frustrating computer issue I've had to solve since I played with my first Trash-80.

Pre Warrior Dude · Mar 08, 2012, 11:54 AM // 11:54

Thanks for the info.. was planning on buying one of these

Quaker · Mar 08, 2012, 04:18 PM // 16:18

It's this sort of thing that makes me feel that using an SSD as a caching drive is probably the best idea until more of the bugs are worked out of SSDs

wolfe faramir · Mar 17, 2012, 01:27 PM // 13:27

The BSOD problem with some SSD's has been a reason I was hesitant to purchase one. After reading up on the issue at www.anandtech.com (worth the read if you are considering one) I ordered an Intel 520 240gb SSD. I'm hoping they got it right.

Krazy Kat · Mar 17, 2012, 05:23 PM // 17:23

Thank you for this thread. I myself have a Crucial M4 128GB and probably would have never updated the firmware until the 5000 hours were up. I was about 2700 hours in so no problems... yet.

afya · Apr 14, 2012, 10:23 PM // 22:23

Thank you for bringing it up. Although having no SSD yet I am going to buy one for my future GW2 rig. And I'll probably get the M4 64 or 128GB. It is nice to know that and fix that before crashing and having no idea the SSD is causing it.