SSD News: Firmware Update Edition

It seems just about everyone has begun 2012 by releasing firmware updates; as usual many are to resolve those pesky, newly discovered BSoD problems that have plagued just about every SSD at one time or another. Here’s a short summary of recently announced firmware updates for Crucial m4, Samsung 830, and OCZ Octane users.

Crucial started things off by announcing the first BSoD bug with its acclaimed (and recently reviewed) m4 SSD lineup. The bug affects all m4 SSDs, but rather bizarrely only comes into play after exactly 5184 hours of power-on use for each individual drive. Thankfully it’s a relatively harmless issue that doesn’t pose a risk to user data, but having one’s system unexplainably blue screen once an hour is probably rather disruptive. Users can grab the fixed firmware here.

Next up we have Samsung, yet another stable long-time SSD producer. Word has it that the company released the first bug fix firmware for its new 830 Series of SSDs back during CES. The issues seem to vary and reportedly only affect a smaller number of users, but will range from BSoD’s and hangs during hibernation mode to partition issues with some external enclosures and laptops.

Samsung then released a second update last Thursday that tweaks the original firmware update, in order to improve “compatibility and stability” with the update software. Samsung 830 users can snag this new firmware here.

Lastly, OCZ has released a new firmware update for its still freshly launched Octane SSDs. For a refreshing change of pace this isn’t a bug fix, instead it claims to deliver a needed “substantial” improvement in random write performance. Astonishingly this isn’t just any small boost, OCZ has revised its 4K random write IOPS performance for Octane by literally doubling the original IOPS. The new firmware will boost the 128GB drive from 7.7K to 18K IOPS, while the 256GB will increase from 12K to 25K IOPS.

This is a rather huge jump in performance for a brand new SSD (and new Indilinx Everest controller) which launched just two months ago. The new Octane firmware is 1.13v, and any early Octane adopters should be quite happy to update given these numbers. It just goes to show, firmware is even more important than the controller itself when it comes to SSD performance.

And as always (and especially with brand new firmware) be sure to back up all important data before updating your SSD!