does it worth it ? Firmware 1916

[sirius69]

The explanations about what this new firmware does are rather vague IMO. The only thing I really care about before spending hours on upgrading this data destructive Firmware is IF THE SSD WILL GAIN SOME SPEED BACK.

With my 64gig, I'm stuck at 75- 80 for writing which is much less than a Western digital Caviar Black. We were all filled up with FALSE ADVERTISING when we've bought those drives, about some super fast read and write numbers which were cut in half in the real world. Now I simply hope that I can regain some speed with that not so good SSD.

So boys and girls , does the pain worth the gain ? I bet not.

After that lame 1819 firmware , I don't trust those guys anymore.

As usual, GSkill is not able to write more than 3-4 lines at the time and too damn lazy to explain in detail, so we don't exactly know what he mean by those useless lines of information about this firmware unless the members report about it.

[gingerbee]

yup i went bcak to 1571 for the performance i have to take apart my raid0 to run wiper every 3 months or so but i don't mind as it's still nice and fast.

offtopic my a-data s592 ssd run trim support on there fw 1848 and wiper still works for it to so what is gskill doing wrong

[sirius69]

what type of falcon you have ? and is this a report from right after flashing or after a while and few reboots ?

[gingerbee]

well since only the falcon 1 has updated fw. yes i have falcon 1. i ran 1819 FW for a few weeks before i went back to 1571 that supports wiper.

[sirius69]

I should of said : what SIZE/GB Falcon 1 do you have ? never mind.

Some people are having a hard time to upgrade . If you are sure that the pin is well inserted and you have problems upgrading, just remove the pin and reboot. We might get an answer to this problem sometimes in the future.

[sirius69]

Ok , let's look at the guide to install this new firmware.

written by GSkill:
Install Falcon SSD, plug the jumper and turn on your machine.

I SAY : install the SSD where ? it's already installed YO because we've just unzipped a file on it, remember ?

Then he go on and say : "quote: Remember to change the jumperafter upgrading firmware "

I say : never mentioned to turn the computer OFF before removing the jumper , he choose the words "change the jumperafter ".... so we assume that we just remove the Jumper LIVE and smile ?

So that's all we got: unzip, jumper , install and change the jumperafter.

[Titus]

the firmware instructions could be written better...but the main thing is that you cannot upgrade the firmware with the SSD as your boot drive...you don't unzip the firmware file onto your SSD boot drive...you need to use another hard drive to do that...then you launch the firmware upgrade tool from the secondary drive

[sirius69]

? We need another harddrive with a vista, xp or win 7 on it, to be able to boot and upgrade the FW ? the SSD will be assigned another drive letter and will be able to upgrade .. Then we put it back into the main computer and re-install the image backup to get everything back LOL more *^&%$ than I thought..

well, well, well.. I'll do that when I have a few days off..

[macdaddy]

new FW is round 10% slower then 1571 FW. I dont mind as its still fast but i run mine in raid 0 so i need GC. If no CG i go back to the 1571 FW.

[sirius69]

ok thanks for the report 10% slower would bring my already very slow falcon 64 piece of crap to a crawl... they can keep their FW , every new FW they release the SSD become even slower.. Ridiculous , no wonder why GSkill is in hiding. Time to look for the older 1571, which i don't have anymore.

GSkill a brand to forget about

[Titus]

all TRIM enabled firmware suffers from a 10% performance hit...OCZ, Patriot, Crucial etc...they all have slowdowns with TRIM...hopefully the SSD is still fast enough even after the 10% hit

[sirius69]

I thought that TRIM was to prevent the SSD from slowing down... They also want us to upgrade for a new firmware to make the SSD last longer , while in fact with all their mombo-jumbo about deleting a whole partition and putting back a mirror image is a hell of a lot more writing that I will do on it in a 6 months..

Anyway a new generation of SDD will come out soon and will make ours just good enough for a laptop.. If I ever buy another one I will make sure that it doesn't use that same stupid way to upgrade the firmware... and it won't be a GSkill for sure.

[TyantA]

How long should it take to do the update? I have it in another system, ran the upgrade application and it reworked the drive saying erasing NAND Flash for rework...done and that's where it sits. I'm not sure what to do. The Main window sill shows "Downloading..." but it's been over 5 minutes of seemingly no activity.

I don't want to brick my drive!

Edit, after reading around, I found that the jumper has to be seated further down. Oh yeah, as for above, my system had locked up. I rebooted, ran in compatibility mode for XP SP3 w/ admin rights and this time it supposedly worked. Fiewf!

For me, going from 1571 > 1916 resulted in 12% speed loss on my 64GB unit. Being that this is in my HTPC, I'll take the hit for less work involved with keeping it peppy. Just under 200MB/s is plenty for my HTPC!