Falcon 2 Firmware Upgrade

[wattgn]

I found the way the firmware update works is VERY poorly thought out and the instructions I have been able to find on it including a video posted on you tube unhelpful.

The way I did it in the end is to put the SSD in a caddy and do the firmware update from my laptop.

I suspect not a lot of people have a second hard drive with the bootable OS on it so leaving it in place and doing it by booting up from another drive once the jumper is in place isn't an option for most people.

Overall, a **** poor system to do the firmware upgrade. Why can't the jumper just boot DOS or even linux from a hidden partition then do the upgrade?

Vertex do it by recommending a bootable dos memory stick with the firmware on it and doing the upgrade this way.

Oh, yes, I had to upgrade my firmware as the SSD had lots of errors on it and my OS was starting to fall apart. I have been told that this is because my Windows 7 64 bit system needs some special settings to avoid disk corruption. I think that this is ******** as W7 automatically optimises for SSD but if I am wrong then there should be detailed instructions on the forum for windows 7 on how to do the correct settings.

WOW, I am severely pissed off with your technical help and support and the way you have designed these things. I also think you are light years from getting these things adopted by normal users if it is so damned complicated.

I'm running my business on this SSD so it has to be reliable and easy to use which so far it has been neither.

[Himmelslicht]

You dont have to boot from a 2nd harddrive, a USB stick with a bootable OS does the job just as well. Also, it merly takes 20-30 mins to install Windows7 on your 2nd drive and upgrade the FW from it.

Also, unlike you said, there is a sticky thread called SSD tweaks, which lists a few things you can do to increase lifespan even more or save space on the SSD. They are not necessary to avoid disc corruption, Windows7 works well in that matter. Hell, i even think automated defragmentation simply doesnt touch the SSD and only automatically defrags the other drives. However, they can increase the lifespan of your SSD even more, tho they will limit the functionality of Windows a little. They are well explained and easy to do.

Its not damned comlpicated, if you want to use the full potential of your hardware, you have to read and learn about. This is the same a motherboard, a grafics card, even a CPU and RAM.

[wattgn]

Falcon 2 Firmware

I think the issue I have is that the manner of firmware updating should be documented better than it is. If you can tell me where in g.skill forum the different ways of firmware updating are clearly explained then let me know...

Likewise there should be official g.skill documents relating to setup on different operating systems. As you say, some 'experienced' people are telling me that corruption can occur on windows 7 if special tweaks are not applied but as you said, this isn't the case.

I guess the two remaining issues I have a bone to pick with g.skill is that having to use the jumper and all the other messing around is not good and reviewers of the product have picked up on this also.

The final issue is that IMHO, the corruption occured because the firmware on the original drive was faulty which is a reliability issue. After my experience I wouldn't be confident in recommending SSDs in general to friends or clients, and this one in particular.

So far the latest firmware is not resulting in any errors during operation and I am checking it twice a day at the moment and will continue to do so for a few weeks until I'm satisfied that there aren't any bugs in this firmware release.

Regards,
Grant

[Himmelslicht]

SSDs are still in a early development stage. By the time i bought mine, it was still unknown even how long an SSD generally will last.
The newest series are using the maximum speed a Sata2 interface can handle.

It will take another 1-2 years, and maybe the Sata3 interface, until i would call them mature.
Until then, id recommend them for the speed, if you need or want it, but not for the reliability and duration. I always keep an somewhat up to date backup from my SSD.

[wattgn]

Norton Ghost Backup/Restore

The other issue I had was doing a restore from Norton Ghost. The restore after the first incident was uneventful, in fact it took about 9 minutes to do the restore back onto the SSD. After the upgrade though it wouldn't work. I had ACHI in BIOS setup and some people were saying to switch it back to IDE then once it booted OK then change the settings back. Anyway, I ended up starting from scratch.

Windows 7 seems to create a 100M partition which I backed up and I think restored along with the c: drive. After the firmware upgrade it wouldn't restore the 100M partition (said it was invalid) so not sure what happened there or whether I should back this 100M partition up or not or even whether it is relevant to the restore process.

Any ideas on that?

Grant

[Himmelslicht]

This 100 MiB Partion is used by Windows to store files used for booting, BitLocker encryption, the File system, etc. There are ways to force it onto the main Partition, but that can cause troubles too. Either way, without this files Windows cannot boot.
Windows should be able to repair it tho. Either with the Startup repair or the installation disk.
I use Windows Backup. I didnt have to use for restoring yet tho.

[wattgn]

Norton Ghost Backup/Restore

I think now that I have upgraded the firmware, Norton Ghost will work just fine. I did try the repair option on the installation disk but it didn't work in this instance.

I backup the files and folders too for good measure as well as having my user profile on another drive. This affects performance but SSDs don't have enough capacity as you know. At least it makes recovery easier if it has to be done from scratch. I may next time just put pictures, documents and video folders on the 1TB drive but leave everything else on the SSD.

Grant

[GSKILL TECH]

The downloadable instructions in the firmware upgrade sticky clearly states picture by picture how to complete the update successfully. Along with the new clean function, it should be very easy to maintain the Falcon SSD. We do understand that is can be confusing for some, so we will improve this with future models. SSD's are still maturing, but rest assure that we are absorbing all your feedback to ideally make the perfect product. Customer satisfaction and quality products are our top priorities.

Thank you
GSKILL TECH

[wattgn]

Firmware Upgrade Instructions

Well, I read the stickies again and they are NOT that helpful.

A lot of the questions pertain to how to get to the point where you are ready to run the update which you guys don't cover at all.

I thought initially that there was a dos or linus partition which was booted when the jumper was installed as this made sense and that the upgrade was run from here but had to reside on a USB stick or other drive. This would be much like recovery say on Norton Ghost.

The way I did it in the end was to put it in a caddy and run the upgrade from my laptop which worked just fine.

Another way of doing it is to leave the SSD in place then have another hard drive in the system which is bootable and run it from here. I doubt if many users just happen to have another bootable drive on their system but it is an option.

You have to admit lots of people have been confused and there is a reason for that aside from the assumption that most users are ********s!

The way it has to be done is really hard work. Vertex do it from a bootable thumb drive and this is much better way to do this. The jumper is also very easy to lose.

Please listen to me and redo those sticky instructions and save a lot of people headaches when upgrading the firmware.

Regards,
Grant