Not too long ago, Intel released a new family of SSD (solid state drive) technology that shattered existing performance levels posted by the other SSD manufacturers.
Shortly after Intel began began shipping the X-25 SSD, a few PC enthusiast websites undertook a detailed and lengthy look at a wide range of performance characteristics and benchmark scores for this new drive.
They found a bug.
The bug they found would cause one of these Intel SSDs to begin to exhibit slower performance after a bit of normal use due to "fragmentation" of the billions of "addresses" within the data structure the hard drives use to store user data.
While not a fatal flaw, the issue can reduce the performance of one of these new drives dramatically over a fairly short period of use -requiring the periodic "reformatting" of the device to restore the rated performance.
This little snafu has likely slowed the adoption of these comparatively expensive storage devices by early adopter PC hardware enthusiasts and specialty PC manufacturers.
Intel denied it at first, but have now reported being able to "replicate" the issue in their testing labs. And at the same time, they have announced a "fix".
There is a new firmware revision for the intel X-25M that can be freely downloaded and implemented to restore normal, amazing, phenomenal, mind-blowing, (ok enough drooling?) operation of these ground-breaking new drives.
**If you own a n Intel X-18M or X-25M and are dying to make use of this wonderous new fix, be prepared to back up your data first!
Here's the link to the download the firmware: http://support.intel.com/support/ssdc/index_update.htm
Here's an in-depth article on this new development written by the original guys(s) that discovered the flaw: http://pcper.com/article.php?aid=691&type=expert&pid=1
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