Crucial to Fix M4 BSOD Issue in Two Weeks
by Kristian Vättö on January 6, 2012 1:41 PM ESTHere we go again. Pretty much every SATA 6Gb/s SSD offering has experienced some issues and it appears the Crucial M4 is no exception. There have been threads about non-stop blue screens of death (BSOD) floating around in Crucial's forums for a month or so. Yesterday, Crucial announced that they are on schedule to provide a firmware update for their M4 SSD series. The update is supposed to fix a firmware bug that is causing the BSODs after about 5000 hours of active use. The BSODs are not random and occur roughly every hour, which definitely affects productivity. Luckily, the data on the SSD remains unaffected. If Crucial is able to meet their schedule, the update will be available the week of January 16th.
Source: Crucial
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damianrobertjones - Friday, January 6, 2012 - link
P.s. The Black screen issue was apparent on the Crucial support forum with NO acknowledgment at all.josephjpeters - Friday, January 6, 2012 - link
I thought all the OCZ haters said Crucial M4 was the way to go?Azsen - Friday, January 6, 2012 - link
Damn, I just installed my new 128GB M4 today. I bought on the recommendations from Anandtech forums too. Oh well hopefully this is fixed within 6 months as that is roughly 5000 hours of 24x7 use. I leave my comp on all the time so I will reach 5000 hours in 6 months easily.Beenthere - Saturday, January 7, 2012 - link
Intel, OCZ, Corsair, Samsung, Crucial, Plextor, etc. have all had SSD issues of one sort or another. As Anandtech stated only a few months ago, consumer grade SSDs are "immature tech" and as such people should think twice about jumping in with both feet until the issues get sorted out.MrSpadge - Saturday, January 7, 2012 - link
Yeah, just jump in with one foot: use the SSD as a cache, so you don't loose any data if it fails.Herp Derpson - Sunday, January 8, 2012 - link
In IT space the only way to have reliability is to buy enterprise products. Intel 510 had zero issues and so any other professional ssd. It's almost impossible for server HDD to die in a reasonable amount of time. In consumer space people will simply buy cheaper product. But if you save money on speed or features you product will not be popular. Testing is the easiest thing to cut, also helps time to market.THizzle7XU - Saturday, January 7, 2012 - link
It seems like to even experience this issue you would have had to been a first month buyer after release and have never shut down your system since install.5000 hours is about 7 months. They only came out in March to early April last year. Seems just by the numbers that the vast majority of owners won't experience this if the patch is coming this month. So far I've been very happy with the 512 GB and 64 GB m4 I bought late last year.
mrcaffeinex - Sunday, January 8, 2012 - link
I purchased a 64GB Crucial M4 in November and had problems with it right out of the box. I went through the troubleshooting in several posts on different forums, but could never get it working quite right with my AMD system on a Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 motherboard. I was about to send it back when I got a 2600K for Christmas.I installed it as the cache drive on a Gigabyte Z68MA-D2H-B3 motherboard and it hasn't given me any more problems. It is overkill for a cache drive, but Windows 7 Professional 64-bit boots on the 2600K system in 18 seconds now, which is down from just over a minute with a 500GB SATA III Seagate Barracuda.
Thanks for letting people know about the firmware update. I will keep it in mind if I ever go back to trying to use the drive on my AMD system. Now if that one only had the caching feature...
Visual - Monday, January 9, 2012 - link
I don't get it, why is the firmware counting the hours and why does it have to start doing anything special after 5000?It really worries me that it might have been some "break-on-purpose" thing so the drives last just enough for the warranty to expire and then you'd need a new one. But they messed up the interval, and their "fix" is going to fix just that part.
m.oreilly - Monday, January 9, 2012 - link
along with crucial, the intel 510 also uses the marvell controller, plextor and corsair included, in their non sandforce offerings. the sammies are too new to tell re issues. the 510 is not an enterprise drive.