Chris Siebenmann
Zoson
@thatcks Any good datacenter tests one drive and one firmware, then all new drives are flashed to that firmware before service. TLER anyone?
It appears that Intel changed the DC S3500 80G SSD from reporting 512b physical sectors to 4k physical sectors in a minor hardware revision.
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@Zoson_TV As far as I know you can't safely flash older firmware on newer drives and I don't know if Intel even gives you older firmware. -
@thatcks That's total nonsense. It's a standard feature of the Intel SSD Toolbox. -
@Zoson_TV It's not a clearly documented one, though, unless it's in the .exe itself (online docs etc do not mention firmwware downgrades). -
@thatcks Clearly stated in the featureset: Firmware update on supported drives, and 3500/3700 is supported. Update doesn't imply one way. -
@Zoson_TV I think it's unclear (since it confused me). It's also not something the standalone updater can do normally, based on screen pics. -
@thatcks Each version of the toolbox firmware utility comes with a different payload. 2.0.6 has 0355.
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Changing reported physical sector size without a model number change is a table flip moment, because it makes our SSD spares not spares.
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And yes, 'smartctl -a' reports the same 'device model' for both drives: Intel SSDSC2BB080G4. Firmware D2010355 versus D2010370.
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@thatcks the 512b physical sector size wasn't reported correctly they've always been 4k sectors. -
@gpapilion In a theoretically datacenter product, correct vs incorrect is far less important than backwards compatibility. 512b->4k is not. -
@thatcks I would disagree. Having 4k sector alignment can give you up to a 20% performance improvement on that drive, old or new firmware.
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Geoffrey Papilion
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