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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apexjr - Friday, January 6, 2012 - link
I have had the 240gb M4 for nearly 6 months and I have never had one problem with it. I don't doubt that it happens to people, but I think it is more directly related to the motherboard chipset then to the SSD. My MB isn't extremely new and doesn't get me 'max' throughput, but I think that has kept it 100% stable.Marlin1975 - Friday, January 6, 2012 - link
Do you have over 5000 hours on yours? D/L something to read the time on your drive. I bet you are no where near the 5k mark that is why.My M4 has only 1100ish hours on it. This seems to only affect those with 5200+ hrs on their drive. I saw a lot of people saying they had intel for their controller but I don't think that is the problem.
That and crucial admited they have a fix for it so I am guessing its a simple code flip somewhere.
Shadowmaster625 - Friday, January 6, 2012 - link
I wonder how all these people got to 5000 hours. If you subtract the amount of time the drive spends asleep or powered off totally, you're not left with much more than 8 hours a day. And at 8 hours a day it would take two years for this issue to show up! Even if it was somehow running 24/7 without ever sleeping it would still take more than 6 months.Kristian Vättö - Friday, January 6, 2012 - link
It's not impossible. If it's your boot drive, it won't enter sleep mode unless you sleep the OS too. Some people like to leave their computer on 24/7 (e.g. for downloads, rendering etc) - let alone if you use it in a some kind of a server.Definitely a lot hours and for many users, it will take years to achieve.
DaFox - Saturday, January 7, 2012 - link
7 months isn't that long..MrSpadge - Saturday, January 7, 2012 - link
Running BOINC ;)rochlin - Friday, January 6, 2012 - link
I don't think Plextor, Samsung or Intel SSDs w. Intel controllers have had such problems. A website that has taken a leadership in SSD tech overviews and reviews SHOULD REPORT WHICH SSDs WE CAN COUNT ON instead of making not-very-useful comments like "Pretty much every SATA 6Gb/s SSD offering has experienced some issues"PRETTY MUCH: Not a useful term in a tech article. Ever.
FATCamaro - Friday, January 6, 2012 - link
Yeah, they don't want to piss of their advertisers haha. Samsung & intel have better records. Although to be fair until this issue so did Corsair. I love my intel 320 even tho its only 3Gb/s.Kristian Vättö - Friday, January 6, 2012 - link
This has nothing to do with our advertisers. Our ads are provided by a third party so we don't even know who the advertisers are ;-) I use adblock on top of that so I'm 100% clueless about our ads as I have never seen them.Like I said in my reply to rochlin, we have no reliable data about what is the most reliable and trouble-free SSD. If we had, you would know about it. Heck, I would love to know about it too! However, I don't think it would be good journalism to say what is good and what is bad SSD based on forum posts.
doobydoo - Saturday, January 7, 2012 - link
The only bias on Anandtech is the links to the Dailytech website.Seriously, Anand, Kristian, you can't try to claim Dailytech is impartial and unbiased, and because of that they really shouldn't be linked on your website.