Intel SSD died, received free upgrade!

D

Dan_D

Extremely [H]
Joined
Feb 9, 2002
Messages
63,076
Well sort of. I was running dual Intel X25-M 80GB G1 drives in RAID0 and one of them crapped out on me. I called up Intel and got them to send me an overnight replacement. I paid their $25 expedite fee and instead of receiving the same drive, I now have a X25-M G2 drive. :cool: I'm probably not going to put the drive back in a RAID0 configuration given that the two drives do not match. The new one supports TRIM and the old one does not. So I'm trying to figure out what I should do. I'm tempted to go by another G2 drive and put them both in RAID0 and move the old G1 drive to my HTPC or something. Unfortunately I believe you lose TRIM support when you place the drives in RAID.
 
Call them up, let them know you had a raid configuration and ask nicely if you can get the other drive swapped out for a G2 as well? :)
 
Neb said:
Call them up, let them know you had a raid configuration and ask nicely if you can get the other drive swapped out for a G2 as well? :)
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I'm not one to push my luck on something like that.
 
How is that pushing your luck? You already received the replacement; it's not like they're going to send the SSD cops to take it back because you asked a question. :p
 
sniggle said:
How is that pushing your luck? You already received the replacement; it's not like they're going to send the SSD cops to take it back because you asked a question. :p
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I'm not too keen on the idea of asking for another free upgrade for a working drive.
 
@sniggle & Neb: They replaced a defective drive, they are not a chairty and or obligated to swap out old parts... That is pretty thrifty/shady to ask for a replacement of a working drive, do you not have any dignity, or is it you feel these high end companies owe you something?

Dan, sounds like you got some decent customer support from Intel. Glad to hear.
 
Did you have to provide them with an invoice of where you pruchased it?
 
You could just sell your old one and buy a new G2. Or, really, you're not going to LOSE performance if you RAID the G1 and G2 together - you just won't see as much of the improvement that G2 brought.
 
Dan_D said:
I'm not too keen on the idea of asking for another free upgrade for a working drive.
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Was half joking, hence the smile at the end. Grats on the free upgrade for the drive that died though!

00PS said:
@sniggle & Neb: They replaced a defective drive, they are not a chairty and or obligated to swap out old parts... That is pretty thrifty/shady to ask for a replacement of a working drive, do you not have any dignity, or is it you feel these high end companies owe you something?
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Holy crap, why the need to go on the attack so quickly? For what it's worth, I've found that just presenting a situation to a rep truthfully and asking nicely can sometimes go a very long way. How does simply asking a question mean I have no dignity or mean that I feel the companies ow me something?
 
00PS said:
@sniggle & Neb: They replaced a defective drive, they are not a chairty and or obligated to swap out old parts... That is pretty thrifty/shady to ask for a replacement of a working drive, do you not have any dignity, or is it you feel these high end companies owe you something?

Dan, sounds like you got some decent customer support from Intel. Glad to hear.
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The experience was actually quite good. I received my drive this morning after only initiating the RMA process yesterday.

Burner27 said:
Did you have to provide them with an invoice of where you pruchased it?
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They asked me how long I have had the drive and where I purchased it. I told them that I had purchased it from Microcenter and that I wasn't sure how long I had owned the drive but that I believed it was purchased around a year ago.

dandragonrage said:
You could just sell your old one and buy a new G2. Or, really, you're not going to LOSE performance if you RAID the G1 and G2 together - you just won't see as much of the improvement that G2 brought.
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Right. That's why I am not going to bother putting them together in RAID0. I just setup the G2 by itself and I'm going to either upgrade to a larger SSD or grab another G2 at a later date.

Neb said:
Was half joking, hence the smile at the end. Grats on the free upgrade for the drive that died though!



Holy crap, why the need to go on the attack so quickly? For what it's worth, I've found that just presenting a situation to a rep truthfully and asking nicely can sometimes go a very long way. How does simply asking a question mean I have no dignity or mean that I feel the companies ow me something?
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I understood your point. And yeah, I've had similar experiences myself. I didn't even realize they were going to send me a different drive until I unboxed it and noticed the difference in color.
 
IIRC, if you grab a second G2 and put them in raid, you'll loose the trim.
 
vengence said:
IIRC, if you grab a second G2 and put them in raid, you'll loose the trim.
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That is my understanding as well. Honestly the main reason why I'd want two of them in RAID0 is for capacity. 80GB is just damned small. With just the OS and drivers I've already burned through about 37% or so of the drive's total capacity.
 
Dan_D said:
They asked me how long I have had the drive and where I purchased it. I told them that I had purchased it from Microcenter and that I wasn't sure how long I had owned the drive but that I believed it was purchased around a year ago.
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So they did not ask for a copy of the receipt?
 
Dan_D said:
That is my understanding as well. Honestly the main reason why I'd want two of them in RAID0 is for capacity. 80GB is just damned small. With just the OS and drivers I've already burned through about 37% or so of the drive's total capacity.
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Yeah, this is what's going to push me to buy a single larger drive. I'd like 160GB, but I think I'll end up living with 120GB for my next build. We'll see how far prices fall with Gen3.
 
vengence said:
IIRC, if you grab a second G2 and put them in raid, you'll loose the trim.
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I read in an Anandtech article that you can leave a certain amount unformatted, somewhere between 7-10% I think, to make up for lack of TRIM. The controller will automatically use the unformatted space as scratch/spare/reserve/whatever space.

That should allow Dan_D to raid the drives together and still keep a good level of endurance?
 
Well for now I'm just going to use the 80GB drive by itself. At a later date I'll purchase a larger hard drive. For now I'm going to put the other drive in one of my other systems. I don't need that much space on my gaming machine. 160GB was enough for quite some time.
 
Neb said:
Holy crap, why the need to go on the attack so quickly? For what it's worth, I've found that just presenting a situation to a rep truthfully and asking nicely can sometimes go a very long way. How does simply asking a question mean I have no dignity or mean that I feel the companies ow me something?
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I'm not attacking, rather, I'm simply judging others for their comments. :p I for one would not ask, but should Dan be upset that he received the G2 drive (from my understanding/comprehension, he isn't) then it might be a valid question to ask for a G1 replacement, instead. But asking for an upgraded drive? Seems [to me] a little out of the ball park. Could it hurt? Probably not, but this is more of a principle argument anyway.
 
Dan_D said:
Well for now I'm just going to use the 80GB drive by itself. At a later date I'll purchase a larger hard drive. For now I'm going to put the other drive in one of my other systems. I don't need that much space on my gaming machine. 160GB was enough for quite some time.
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I've been living on ~100GB for a while now. I reinstalled to see "if I could live with it". As long as I don't try to have every game I own installed, and instead the ones I'll play at least once a month I haven't found it to be a problem.
 
vengence said:
I've been living on ~100GB for a while now. I reinstalled to see "if I could live with it". As long as I don't try to have every game I own installed, and instead the ones I'll play at least once a month I haven't found it to be a problem.
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Well I needed my machine operational now and I don't really feel like spending the cash on another G2 drive. I'll deal with getting a larger single SSD at a later time. So the G2 is in and the OS is reinstalled. Working on my Windows 2008 R2 server is fine, but a bit limited as far as gaming and other things are concerned.
 
Dan_D said:
Well I needed my machine operational now and I don't really feel like spending the cash on another G2 drive. I'll deal with getting a larger single SSD at a later time. So the G2 is in and the OS is reinstalled. Working on my Windows 2008 R2 server is fine, but a bit limited as far as gaming and other things are concerned.
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Oh no question. Planning a future build, and reacting to failures are two different beasts.
 
I'm glad the op got a replacement from Intel but am I the only one here who's more concerned with why a supposed high end solid state device has failed so soon? Isn't the idea of no moving/wearable parts supposed to mean no breaking down? I know there's a chance anything can break but wow.
 
They probably ran out of G1s.

Hey Dan....maybe you got one of my 3 RMA'd G2s. :D
 
Any idea what killed the SSD? Did it just vanish one day?

And yes, RAID means no TRIM.
 
Savoy said:
I'm glad the op got a replacement from Intel but am I the only one here who's more concerned with why a supposed high end solid state device has failed so soon? Isn't the idea of no moving/wearable parts supposed to mean no breaking down? I know there's a chance anything can break but wow.
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It's not like there's a flood of these reports so, while interesting, I don't find it greatly concerning yet.

The G1s had no TRIM support and in RAID there would be no GC of any kind even if you used a tool to manually perform GC. We also don't know how full the OP kept these drives. Maybe their "failure" was simply running out of reallocation blocks? HDs fail with controller failures and silent corruption all the time which also have nothing to do with the "moving parts". Sticks of DDR go bad too - no moving parts there either (though admittedly lower impact to your vital data than losing FLASH).
 
in RAID there would be no GC of any kind even if you used a tool to manually perform GC
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AFAIK, all SSDs have some kind of GC running in the background. If they didn't, they would grind to a halt.

I've run the G1s and G2s in RAID0.
 
Old Hippie said:
AFAIK, all SSDs have some kind of GC running in the background. If they didn't, they would grind to a halt.
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Pretty sure not all, but all good ones do. Remember the first JMicron drives, which make even the current JMicron drives look like Bugatti Veyrons?
 
dandragonrage said:
Pretty sure not all, but all good ones do. Remember the first JMicron drives, which make even the current JMicron drives look like Bugatti Veyrons?
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GC of what? Without filesystem intelligence via TRIM the SSD has no idea what previously allocated blocks have been freed. Without that information there's no "garbage" to collect or blocks to pre-erase. The erase then can't take place until a block is targeted for overwrite by the OS. I suppose at this time the controller in the SSD can simply reallocate that logical block from the pool and slate erasure for a later time.

Either way you have no true pre-erase function and the NAND will run close to "full" when no filesystem intelligence is conveyed via TRIM. GC without TRIM is going to be pretty weak compared to having the OS and the SSD cooperate.
 
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Surly73 said:
The G1s had no TRIM support and in RAID there would be no GC of any kind
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No, Intel G1s do have GC. You seem to be forgetting that all SSDs have more flash capacity than they do specified LBAs. So even if every LBA has been written to, there are still unused flash pages in the SSD. GC will consolidate (collect) those unused pages into chunks the size of a flash erase block, and then erase the blocks, so that there will be pre-erased pages ready to be written to.
 
Got a PS3 console? get another G2 for your RAID and put the old G1 in the PS3
 
I don't have a PS/3. I have no plans to buy one anytime in the future. I've got an HTPC, laptop and a server which are all candidates for the upgrade.
 
Those would gain a better benefit anyways, since the PS3 doesn't benefit much from a SSD.
 
Neb said:
Those would gain a better benefit anyways, since the PS3 doesn't benefit much from a SSD.
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Can you not store game content on the hard drive like you can with the Xbox? I don't own a PS3 and I don't use my Xbox much, but I'm just curious.
 
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