Kingston Releases Important Firmware Fix for SSDNow V100 Solid-State Drives

Kingston has emailed us to get the word out to all SSDNow V100 users about a latent technical issue discovered in the V100 drive’s firmware. This issue can cause the drive to become unresponsive at POST or during the booting process. Various posts across several forums allude to the SSD becoming completely inaccessible and/or causing the computer to hang for a few minutes while attempting to access the unresponsive drive.

Even if you own a V100 drive and have not experienced any problem, it is highly recommended that you update the firmware on any V100 drives you may have. To verify if your SSD is one in need of a firmware update, Kingston has provided us a list of affected models.

It is important to note that none of Kingston’s other numerous SSDNow models families are affected. We have checked around and many stores are still listing these affected models, so if you should find this page in the near future and have recently bought one of the models listed, we strongly suggest verifying what firmware version the drive shipped with and upgrade if necessary.

If needed, Crystal Disk Info is one application that can quickly identify the firmware version for most SSDs. Additionally Kingston lists the firmware edition in the lower right corner on the label. Drives with firmware D100811a should be updated, while the updated firmware itself is D110225a.

The firmware update can be downloaded from Kingston’s dedicated support page:

http://www.kingston.com/support/ssdnow/v100_firmware.asp

If users experience any trouble or simply have questions concerning the updating process, they can contact Kingston’s customer service at (888)-484-9125 for more information.

As always with any SSD firmware updates, we highly suggest backing up all data first before attempting to update the drive. Although updating the firmware for most devices has become a fairly routine affair these days, it is still a process that involves some risk. Nevertheless we strongly recommend upgrading the firmware if you own an affected Kingston SSD, and in fact we recommend updating the firmware on any SSDs you may own just for the myriad of bug fixes, stability, and occasional performance updates they may include.