Kingston Releases New V100 Firmware to Address Data Loss Bug
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 28, 2011 8:11 PM ESTWhile I was at CTIA last week I ran into a friend from Kingston who let me know about an issue with the JMicron JMF618 based SSDNow V100 SSDs that were released last year. We never formally reviewed the V100 here on AnandTech but I've tested the drive and we've occasionally included scores from it in our reviews.
With the original firmware on the V100 there's apparently a chance you could lose data. Kingston wouldn't go into specifics other than the usual "this only impacts a small percentage of users" line we typically get with things like this. Kingston has an updated firmware that apparently fixes the problem available here.
Note that I never saw the original issue and I just now got access to the fixed firmware, so approach with caution. If you own a V100 drive back up and give this thing a try.
The full release from Kingston is below:
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softdrinkviking - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link
ah. JMicron. thought it was a typo, never knew there were two separate companies.yesh, guess i'll steer clear.
Nentor - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 - link
Ditto. It controls two SATA ports on my P45 board. Just altogether weird behavior (suddenly all kinds of programs from Quintessential Player to VLC become unresponsive after reading an audio cd from a cdrom player attached to a sata port controller by the Jmicron chip) with the drivers that come with Windows or their own drivers.I'd never think about hooking up a HD to it after reading all the problems with it, but I thought a cdrom player would be OK.
Their drivers now are WHQL (riiight), but I wonder if they simply bought that?
Pessimism - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
+6Agreed. I've ranted before on JMicron related articles regarding their terrible, terrible products. I feel dirty owning a netbook with one of their card readers, and they didn't even do that right (it often decides not to read the card until you insert it a few times).
Let us all be thankful that they have not reached the market penetration level that Realtek has. Crab audio, crab ethernet, crab wireless, crab system management ICs... at least Realtek's stuff is usually passable for light use and their driver updates are pretty frequent.
TrevorH - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link
I don't believe there is any connection between JMicron and Micron apart from 6 letters.howsthecake - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link
So, Kingston issues a firmware update for a rare problem, and AnandTech makes it front-page news. OCZ knowingly passes off inferior, slower, smaller drives as Vertex 2, and AnandTech does absolutely nothing to notify its readers when OCZ finally fesses up and agrees to replace drives.Gabelooo - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link
I did have the problem. Kingston sent me RMA docs for sending the drive back through fedex (free of charge). Had to email them back after a while to know what was going on, and they ended up telling me no more v100 were available, so they shipped me a v100+Point is, whenever I setup a system with an SSD boot drive and a large data drive, I always keep a 64 gigs unallocated partition on the big data drive. When your SSD fails, you can install windows to that partition while you wait for a replacement.
derektrotter - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 - link
I have it on good authority that the Kingston drives would occasionally respond to a TRIM command by TRIMming (erasing) a different block than you asked to be erased. This would of course result in data loss.This problem was reported (with information to prove it true) by an associate of mine to Kingston many weeks ago.
Most likely this fix is related to this.
danzi88 - Wednesday, April 6, 2011 - link
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