Comments on f/w 1916

[ace-a-rue]

everytime i did a firmware update, i then partitioned/format the drive..once that was done, i always ran wiper.exe before recovering my backup image of my OS.

[ace-a-rue]

looks like 1571 did not cure my pause/freeze problem.

i am going to uncheck the advance caching to see if that changes anything.

[macdaddy]

The 1916 is pretty optimised in my opinion.
You just cannot get 1571 performance out of 1916. 1916 had GC and there is overhead to this feature. Speed zealots are going to want to run 1571 and that's fine but you will have to manually run wiper.exe to get performance back. With RAID this complicates the issue as you will need to image your array and run wiper.exe on each independent drive. They must be formatted in order for it to run so you're stuck with that THEN restoring your image.

With GC this is no longer necessary. Are you giving up performance? Sure and it's apparent on benchmarks. Will you see / feel it running slower? I seriously doubt it.

Any firmware updates in the future will (most likely) concentrate on fixing bugs and other stuff that may be broken. Increased performance? POSSIBLY but I would not bet on it.

IMHO of course.

For raid 0 save yourself alot of time and hook the ssd's to usb bartpe and run OCZ sanitary erase.

[ace-a-rue]

well, i think i might have found the answer to the pausing problem from an Anandtech article that another user in this forum posted.

here is Anandtech's Quote:

The first thing I noticed about the drive was how fast everything launched. This experience was actually the source of my SSD proof-of-value test; take a freshly booted machine and without waiting for drive accesses to stop, launch every single application you want to have up and running at the same time. Do this on any system with a HDD and you?ll be impatiently waiting. I did it on the SuperTalent SSD and, wow, everything just popped up. It was like my system wasn?t even doing anything. Not even breaking a sweat.

I got so excited that I remember hopping on AIM to tell someone about how fast the SSD was. I had other apps running in the background and when I went to send that first IM and my machine paused. It was just for a fraction of a second, before the message I'd typed appeared in my conversation window. My system just paused.

Maybe it was a fluke.

I kept using the drive, and it kept happening. The pause wasn?t just in my IM client, it would happen in other applications or even when switching between apps. Maybe there was a strange OS X incompatibility with this SSD? That?d be unfortunate, but also rather unbelievable. So I did some digging.

Others had complained about this problem. SuperTalent wasn?t the only one to ship an affordable drive based on this controller; other manufacturers did as well. G.Skill, OCZ, Patriot and SiliconPower all had drives shipping with the same controller, and every other drive I tested exhibited the same problem.

AND, here is where i think the issue lies:

Drive vendors were mum on the issue of pausing or stuttering with their drives. Lots of finger pointing resulted. It was surely Microsoft?s fault, or maybe Intel?s. But none of the Samsung based drives had these problems.

Then the issue was cache. The JMicron controller used in these drives didn?t support any external DRAM. Intel and Samsung?s controllers did. It was cache that caused the problems, they said. But Intel?s drive doesn?t use the external DRAM for user data.

my thought is (system) DRAM might be the problem vis-a-vis, timing, with the system memory accessing the SSD drive...i guess, slower DRAM trying to negotiate with fast DRAM, causing a pause or freeze!

[TyantA]

I went to try the firmware update but I couldn't get very far. Jumping the pins on the drive caused a) the drive to be detected in the bios but b) not boot. I'm suddenly realizing this is likely by design as you likely can't boot from the same drive you're trying to flash. Thankfully I have another desktop I can throw this into to get the job done - presuming that is what I want to accomplish given the responses in this thread.

[sirius69]

you can not flash a SSD when it is the boot drive, you have to find another computer and connect the ssd on it as a secondary HD to be able to flash it, all the data will be erased on the SSD. Connect the pins BEFORE booting with the other computer.

In my case I use an old hard drive that has win 7 32 bit on it, I boot with it and update the SSD.

[ace-a-rue]

since unchecking "Enable write caching on the disk," in the SSD drive properties, under the "Policies" tab, i have not had any pauses...it has been unchecked for about two weeks.