I surrender - GSKILL wins

[bs11]

My 128 gb Falcon drive, bought in early May 09, has been stuttering for a few weeks now (it is the boot drive for Vista Ultimate 64bit), to the point where Windows would be unresponsive for 2-30+ min at a time. Instead of running wiper and starting anew, I decided to give the new firmware upgrade a shot and working from there.

I finally got around to attempting to upgrade my firmware to 1571....I've attempted to upgrade the firmware on 11 computers with various specs in various configurations and made absolutely no progress whatsoever. I know some people have had no trouble at all with the firmware, while some people struggled initially, and some people have had absolutely no success. It seems I am part of the last group. The poor documentation with the firmware update certainly doesn't help things, nor the three exe's that consist of the update. It seems that the firmware update program will only work in certain computer configurations....which is really sad

I've tried so many different things on so many different machines now that compiling a list would take a lot of time. Brief summary: I've tried ATA mode in BIOS (as well as other modes), boot with UBCDWin to install the firmware, disable/enable AHCI, tried various SATA ports under different chipsets, tried Win XP Home (SP1-3), tried Win XP Pro (SP1-3), tried Vista Ultimate (retail - SP1), tried a usb to sata adapter, tried repair/recovery mode in various Windows installation disks to install firmware, tried sata to esata ports on laptops and pcs, unplugging and plugging in the Falcon at various times during the installation to change the logical drive number, with and without the jumper, different sata cables, with and without latest BIOS updates, using different BIOS settings, different power inputs, redownloading the firmware update, tried the other exes in the firmware update download, SATA I and SATA II, and several other things. In most of these tests, the drive will appear in Device manager (under YATA...) yet the firmware update tool start.exe will never detect it.

I've given up; I've surrendered. GSKILL - looks like you win this battle.

bs

[Tradesman]

Join the crowd, there a number of us out here that have done the same, I've got 2 GSkill SSDs on a shelf, a number of others here in the forum have sold them at a loss, and I know of a number of builder that have taken losses on these...and it's not real comforting when you go for support and the reply is a suggestion to buy their higher priced drives....which all apparently have problems also.

[zsnow]

If you can't flash the firmware , why don't you just RMA it and ask them to flash and send you back?
BTW:My first firmware update went very well and it is even a macbook.It's bit harder to do it on a laptop, as you have to let the bottom open.

[Ristogod]

Strange that you should say that G.Skill wins. More than likely, you won't be buying from them again. So I'd say this is more of a lose/lose situation.

They really need to offer a flashing service as an option for the less technical where you send the drive in, they flash and send it back to you. A simple option like that would keep them ahead of some of their competitors. A lot of people would even be willing to pay a small fee for it.

Sadly though, like most businesses, they become infatuated with all the wrong issues and never address those most impacting their sales.

[helmuth]

Thanks to you, now i know i'am not a fool.

I just have exactly the same problem, even tried to upgrade FW in the store i bought it.

MISSION: I-M-P-O-S-S-I-B-L-E

And by the way, it doesn't work in a new macbook pro 13'.

[Tradesman]

Ristogood:

Good idea, I copied/pasted your post into General Discussions under the HELP GSKILL THREAD

Tman