INTEL 510 SSD - SLOW SPEED - FIRMWARE PROBLEM

[ianpugh]

Hi,

There's been a thread going at Intel for a while now about speed problems when you have more than one 510 SSD in a system. The thread is here:-

http://communities.intel.com/thread/23997?start=0&tstart=0

It seems there are two firmwares out there - PPG/PWG2 and PPG/PWG4 (PPg for 120gb and PWG for 250gb). If you have one of both there is a very high chance that one or both of your drives will not run at 6gb/s even if you have it connected to a SATA 3 port.

The problem seems to affect AHCI and not RAID configurations. One person bought a new drive so they had both PWG4 and the problem went away. Anyway, all the details are in that thread at Intel.

This has been seen happening on ASUS motherboards and Dell. At first Intel denied it was a problem and blamed the mobo manufacturers (how original!) but now they seem to have realised there is a problem. Unfortunately they have had about 5 weeks to do something but they still keep fobbing us off with the usual "we're looking into it" replies. Although it's better than their earlier "the problem doesn't exist" answer it's still pretty rubbish.

So my advice is DO NOT BUY MORE THAN ONE INTEL 510 SSD UNLESS YOU ARE SURE THEY HAVE THE SAME (PROBABLY BEST TO GET THE NEWEST) FIRMWARE.

Otherwise you may only get 3 gb/s from them.

It's almost impossible to get a retailer to check which firmware so I'm not sure if its even worth buying at all until Intel sort it out.

Check that thread or go to Intel Support Community and search for "Intel 510 SSD Seen as 3Gbs Drive" in the topics.

Cheers.

 

[ianpugh]

I still haven't heard anything more from Intel. It's now been 8 weeks since Intel were first informed of this problem. I guess they just don't give a sh*t?

8 weeks?

It looks like they don't think it's important enough or not enough people have the problem for it to be worth the effort. I recommend just taking the drive back to the retailer and asking for an exchange. It's been proved that there is an issue so they shouldn't give you too much trouble. Howeber, I thought the same of Intel but they've turned out to be utterly useless!