Crucial M4 drives failing in droves at 5200 hours of cumulative operation!

ZodaEX said:
Wow you have 100% faith in this Crucial company to fix this. I remember when Intel made the initial press release that they fixed the 8MB bug, then it turned out they actually hadn't fixed it but merely reduced the occurrence. I'm glad your satisfied with you M4 but, when I buy a new computer part I expect it to be reliable the day I bring it home, not months later.
Click to expand...

So if you went and bought a new honda and had to take it back under warranty for a fix - bam, never buy a honda again. Move on to the next manufacturer. Repeat. When you make it through all the manufacturers do you reset, or start riding a bike?

The reality is there are going to be problems with everything - it's a complicated system and reliability has to be balanced with cost. You could already go out now and buy enterprise level gear which has a much higher MTBF - at the expense of cost - but really not many at the consumer level do that.

Heck, people continue to buy OCZ stuff which have a litany of faliures, issues, and problems - and this amply demonstrates the fact that absolute reliability is low on most peoples list.
 
ChrisBenn said:
So if you went and bought a new honda and had to take it back under warranty for a fix - bam, never buy a honda again. Move on to the next manufacturer. Repeat. When you make it through all the manufacturers do you reset, or start riding a bike?

The reality is there are going to be problems with everything - it's a complicated system and reliability has to be balanced with cost. You could already go out now and buy enterprise level gear which has a much higher MTBF - at the expense of cost - but really not many at the consumer level do that.

Heck, people continue to buy OCZ stuff which have a litany of faliures, issues, and problems - and this amply demonstrates the fact that absolute reliability is low on most peoples list.
Click to expand...

I don't understand why you are going off on me as if I had said that I'd never buy another Crucial SSD ever again simply because i'm personally unsatisfied with mine. I bought the M4 because I thought it wouldn't require mandatory FW updates such as the Vertex 3 ect...

Buying an expensive enterprise SSD with a much higher MTBF isn't going to save you from a catastrophic FW Bug such as the M4 5,200 hour issue or Intel's 8MB bug. I realize that there's always potential to have problems with any component, however were talking about a FW design flaw that eventually affects 100% of everybody, not a small 1% of unlucky customers. If I knew "for sure" the drive would croak after 7 months if if didn't update the FW I wouldn't have bought it.

This is a computer enthusiast forum. People here are going to provide feedback on their purchasing experiences and that's a good thing. :)
 
Haven't these been shipping with the 0009 firmware for a while now? I was already aware of his issue, but now you've got me paranoid. I guess I better go check the one I bought last month.
 
ZodaEX, a more positive spin is that you got rid of the NVIDIA motherboard - their SATA implementation is just...shall we say...horrible?

Ugh I am having flashbacks to the nforce 2 SATA corruption problems I had - arrghhhhhhh I think I'm going to be sick. :(
 
I think all manufacturers experience some kind of issue, it's just that some get whitewashed more than others.
 
ZodaEX said:
I don't understand why you are going off on me as if I had said that I'd never buy another Crucial SSD ever again simply because i'm personally unsatisfied with mine. I bought the M4 because I thought it wouldn't require mandatory FW updates such as the Vertex 3 ect...
Click to expand...

First sorry - wasn't trying to "go off on you" - rather it just seemed like a good context to talk about the general sentiment.

As for this issue, to an extent it's going to be like the difference between 100% uptime and 99.99% uptime - *never* having an incident becomes almost statistically impossible as time increases. In the end I think the more telling things are
*how often there are incidents
*the severity of them
*how the follow-up/support is handled

Buying an expensive enterprise SSD with a much higher MTBF isn't going to save you from a catastrophic FW Bug such as the M4 5,200 hour issue or Intel's 8MB bug.
Click to expand...

You can pay more money to get more reliability - that's pretty much how it always has worked. In this specific case the thought would be with a more expensive drive that more extensive quality control also took place. (Of course you would probably only be able to use the drive in one of 5 vetted server chassis, etc.)

If I knew "for sure" the drive would croak after 7 months if if didn't update the FW I wouldn't have bought it.
Click to expand...

Well yeah - "If I knew this was going to break I wouldn't have bought it" :)
 
Anyone update to firmware 0309 yet? I'll guess I'll be the guinea pig.

My data is backed up to my WHS everyday so I'm not scared. Plus I have 2 of these M4 drives.
 
Got my new M4 today and I'm so glad the fw is out already. From the crucial forums I read that the update can be applied in AHCI mode, no need to switch to IDE.
 
got my m4 last month, so wasn't experiencing the sympthoms yet, but updated the firmware from 0009 to 0309 nonetheless.
followed the instructions in the PDF, was a pretty painless procedure.
After the update, Windows was still there and bootable.
AS-SSD benchmarks are still about the same as before the update.
 
I just got done with my update and thought I would pass along some information. My system is the first one is my sig. I use 4 drives in it: a 256GB Crucial M4, a pair of RAID 0 640GB WD Blue Series and a 1TB hard drive.

The firmware update did not find the drive with RAID enabled in BIOS. I had to drop back to AHCI and make the DVDROM 1st in priority. The M4 was detected this time and updated in about 60 seconds. Once I restarted, I had to reenable RAID in the BIOS and then restart and go back to the BIOS. This turned my RAID drives back to a single drive from the individual drives. I could then move my M4 back to the 1st hard drive position, select it in the boot device priority as number 1. I tried skipping the reboot after setting RAID and even with my M4 still listed as 1st Priority in the Boot Order, it couldn't start the OS. It moved from my first hard drive to 3rd in the BIOS and had to be moved back to 1st. The order may be caused by how I connected my SATA cables (I wanted the RAID drive on 0 and 1 to make sure there were no problems). Once I restarted, I went into Windows which found the drive anew and asked for a reboot. Smooth Sailing now.

tl;dr - If you are set to RAID in BIOS, you need to go back temporarily to AHCI for the update. There are a few extra steps to reenabling RAID.
 
Bought a M4 and installed it yesterday. Updated to FW309 this AM. No problems at all.
 
MrCrispy said:
Got my new M4 today and I'm so glad the fw is out already. From the crucial forums I read that the update can be applied in AHCI mode, no need to switch to IDE.
Click to expand...

I did FW updates 2 times now and I never did that switch back. FW309 update went smoothly for me. Seems a little snappier but I'm not sure.
 
The hardest part was finding a PS2 dongle for my keyboard. No access to the BIOS with a USB keyboard.
 
I had the firmware update not recognize my drive. I figured it was because I had the drive hooked up to a SATA3 port (it mentions this as a potential problem) so I had put off updating because I didn't feel like digging into my rig right now. I use my SSD as a cache so it was set to RAID mode. Setting it to IDE temporarily allowed the flash to go through. Thanks for the tip.
 
Just flashed my 64GB M4. I have an Asus P8Z68-V. Just an FYI I had to disable the JMicron eSata controller to get the flash program to run properly. If I did not, the flash program would fail. Now it may be because I have a drive attached to the eSata port and could have just unplugged the drive but I disabled it in the BIOS instead. Hope this helps anyone else that has this issue.
 
Just flashed mine. Smooth sailing at this moment in time. Thanks again for starting this thread as it saved me from a major future headache.
 
Flashed my 128mb M4 last night. Backed it up first, just in case, but no issues to report. Asus Sabertooth P67 on Intel SATA3 port, AHCI mode.
 
Flashed mine in AHCI mode on the Intel 6GB port - so worth trying first before you go swapping cables.
 
Mine seems good to go.

I did however have to move my CD-Rom to the same Intel ports as the SSD.
 
flashed my 64gb from dvd in ahci mode. No issues, windows 7 works as before.
 
Flashed my M4 successfully and didn't even have to rebuild my entire system, w00t.
 
Was able to update it on my MBP, which I'd assume was using AHCI. No issues.
 
Flashed 64GB unit successfully using their bootable CDROM in AHCI mode.
 
Last edited:
Flashed fine onto both 256 GB M4 drives, one was new and the other had data. So far, so good.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top