ADATA XPG SX900 128GB SSD Review Redux @ [H]

ADATA XPG SX900 128GB SSD Review Redux - Our original review of the ADATA XPG SX900 ended on a sour note. Unreleased critical firmware revisions and unexpected power consumption figures led us to question ADATA's customer support. Today we take another look with a fresh sample and a new firmware revision that ADATA has made available to its customers.

We immediately note the much lower startup voltage with the new sample.

Click to expand...

I'll bet you a million dollars the voltage was pretty close to exactly the same.

Glad to see the manufacturer has taken some steps in the right direction. Keep that pressure up, Kyle. It's why we love the [H].

I own more than a handful of ADATA SSD's and overall I've been really happy with them, even the customer service part (for the most part... I'll explain in a sec).

I have three 128GB S599, one 128GB SP900 in my Macbook Pro, and a 256GB in my X79 socket 2011 based workstation. A year or so ago I had to contact them to get an RMA for one of the S599's that failed after six months of use. Surprisingly it went fairly smoothly. Only thing I can say that's "bad" about the experience is that they handle all RMA's through email only, but in hindsight it really wasn't that bad.

One thing you nailed right on the head though Kyle is the issue with firmware updates. When the S599's first came out ADATA did release firmware updates for it and were (generally) easy to apply to the drive. As long as you weren't running RAID it was relatively easy to do it. Since the last official release for the S599 they've been laxing big time though.

Back when I got the RMA for my dead S599 their support team had sent me links to beta firmware that's newer than the official 3.6.5 firmware that's about a year old on their site. You'd think they'd have released something newer than 3.6.5 in the year that's transpired since they obviously have it, but the official firmware's been stuck in the mud since. Normally I personally could care less as long as the drives work as they should but in my case when I upgraded from an AMD Phenom II to my new X79 based system, although the S599's are qualified to run in a RAID array (and worked flawlessly with the AMD RAID controller on my old board), just plain old didn't work for crap on my X79 board in RAID. They'd randomly drop out of the array for no reason whatsoever. I ended up just upgrading to a SP900 and running it and the S599's in AHCI mode (and soft-RAID'ing the S599's in Win7Ultimate). Other than a random BSOD on boot that's being caused by the SP900 that's quickly cured by hitting the reset button, overall it's worked fine, I've been happy with it, and I've very patiently been waiting for a firmware update to the SP900 that would hopefully fix the BSOD on boot problem.

If the above paragraph sounds needlessly complicated and has more info than you care to know about, then you're going to love what I'm about to write.

Before writing this post I decided to try and update the firmware on my SP900 drive (after seeing this article and you mentioning that they released updated firmware, so I checked and sure enough they finally updated the firmware for this drive too). Off to their page I go...

It took about 10 minutes of trying/refreshing before the page would even load. Either their site is getting DDoS'ed from everyone who's read your article and are trying to do the same thing I'm doing, or their web server is running off of a Commodore 64 with a team of 1541 disk drives, no fast load cartridge, and a 300 baud 1650 modem. Eventually the page loads and I see that instead of just one updater like they had in the past, you now have to download two files; one being the updater program and the other being the actual firmware files. Click on the download link... wait, now it wants my email address??! OK fine.. Both files eventually download over their 300 baud connection and they're sitting on my desktop.

I unzip the firmware file and give it a quick look. There's a PDF readme file in there with the basic instructions on how to use it:

"For an Intel based system, you may need to disable the Intel RST driver and revert
back to the Microsoft default AHCI driver and then run the update utility.
On an AMD based system, the AMD AHCI driver may be blocking the update utility.
The Windows AHCI driver must be loaded. To to this, right click on Computer and choose
manage. Go to IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers>AMD SATA Controller or Intel SATA Controller.
Right click on this and choose Update Driver software. Select Browse>Let me pick.
Choose "Standard AHCI" from the list. Then reboot the computer. Then you should be
able to run the update utility.
After firmware update completed, right click on Computer and choose manage. Go to IDE
ATA/ATAPI controllers>AMD SATA Controller or Intel SATA Controller.
Right click on this and choose Update Driver software. Select Browse>Let me pick.
Choose your previous driver. Then reboot the computer."

(btw I purposely didn't fix the sentence structure in that paragraph I just copied and pasted above. That's how it's written and that's about all there is for info in that readme file).

BTW it's not "you may need to disable the Intel RST driver and revert back to the Microsoft default AHCI driver". You HAVE to revert it. It doesn't like iRST AT ALL.... fine. I uninstall it. Reboot. Go into device mangler, downgrade the Intel C600 SATA driver to the Microsoft ACHI 1.0 driver, reboot and log back in. Finally we're almost there, right? WRONG!

Run the updater as Administrator and scan for drives. It finds the SP900 drive in my system and shows me all the relevant information. I click the checkbox and click the update firmware button. A dialog box opens asking me to find the firmware file I downloaded separately. I point it to the folder with all the files... and which file do I pick??!? WTF??!?!

Look back at the downloads for any relevant information, and of course there isn't any.

Back to the web site I go. The page eventually loads and lo and behold there's the instructions in PDF format available as a download (you know, the instructions THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN INCLUDED IN THE FIRMWARE DOWNLOAD??!?). Click on it, have to enter my email address AGAIN.. and finally I get the instructions.

So what'd I miss earlier? Apparently it's up to you to match the last five digits in the device's signature ID to a file that matches the first five digits of one of the many included firmware files! How could I miss THAT; I mean that's totally intuitive, right?

I go back, "do the needful", quadruple check to make sure I selected the right file, cross my fingers, bless myself, and click the SELECT button...

...and nothing...

For a minute I sat in front of my system wondering to myself "did it work??!?". After a minute a green checkmark appeared next to my drive in the list. Apparently whomever wrote the program didn't think it'd be necessary to inform the person doing the flashing that it was actually doing anything until it was done.

Reboot the system, re-install iRST drivers, and .. well.. here I am now writing this.


Now, I've been building and fixing computers for about 25 years and I'm going to publicly say that this has to be the most convoluted and brain dead example of how to update the firmware on a device that I've ever seen so far in my life. I mean, even Rube Goldberg and the Mythbusters would be in awe at just how needlessly over-complex this whole process is.

Maybe I'm just nuts, but dontchya think that it'd be a lot easier, simpler, and in the long run safer if ADATA just created an updater that worked off of a bootable USB flash drive? Bonus points if the updater program itself had enough intelligence to read the necessary signature info from the drive and match it up to the correct firmware file too!

Hopefully someone from ADATA reads this post and takes my suggestion to heart. There really is no excuse for this process being this complicated.