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Firmware Flashing (Falcon SSD)

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  • Firmware Flashing (Falcon SSD)

    After spending 2 days and more then 20 attempts to flash my drive I finally figured it out. I figured I would share my findings since a lot of people seem to be having problems with drive flashing.

    Problem:
    Can't boot from a USB thumb drive

    Solution:
    Ended up using a compact flash card and usb reader to boot from because my bios supported it. Some motherboards might not support USB booting at all and you will need to burn a bootable CD with the flash files on them.

    Problem:
    The drive is not found when I run the flash utility 128GB-x.EXE

    Solution:
    Ensure that your bios is configured for IDE mode and not AHCI or RAID while you do the flash. If you don't do this the drive will not show up. If you are unlucky like me and your bios doesn't support anything other then AHCI or doesn't let you change the option at all then you will need to buy an SSD to IDE converter (NewEgg) and connect your drive to the physical IDE header on your motherboard. If you dont have an IDE header then you wont be able to use that system to flash the drive

    Problem:
    I run 128GB-1.EXE and it says it failed to download the files

    Solution:
    This is because in my case I had to run 128GB-2.exe instead. There is no documentation I can find on which one you are supposed to run so make sure you try all 3 (128GB-1.EXE, 128GB-2.EXE, 128GB-3.EXE).

    Problem:
    After flashing the drive the performance is completely in the dumpster. The drive is slower then an old 5400 RPM. For some reason when you flash the drive firmware it gets all confused obviously and needs the disk securly formatted. To do this you need to create the ultimate boot disk (google it) and open Parted Magic and conduct a secure format. There is a sticky on it. This operation only takes a few seconds and will restore the performance to you drive. If you dont do this step Windows will take like 3 hours to install as apposed to 15 minutes.

    I hope this helps some people solve there problems with the Falcon SSD. I hope I never have to flash the firmware again on this device because it was an absolute nightmare. I am going to see if any other SSD MFG's make devices that are easier to flash because if they are all this way I might just give up but if Intel for instance can flash there drives right from the OS without loss of data then I will gladly pay extra.
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