Customers on the Crucial support forums started posting about strange BSODs with their 64gb Crucial M4 SSDs recently. The issue results in the following error on a blue screen in Windows: 0x00000f4
It’s an odd bug, because by all accounts it happens after the drive has been in service exactly 5200 hours. From then on, every hour, the drive will crash with that error. Rebooting gives the users another hour of uptime.
The error has been acknowledged by Crucial staff in the following post:
We are aware of an issue that is currently affecting a small number of users whereby their m4 causes their system to require a restart. This issue occurs after approximately 5,000 hours of actual “on time” use. Following the initial reboot, the system then requires subsequent restarts after each additional hour of use. However, the data on the SSD is unaffected and will not be lost due to this condition.
Through our investigation, we have determined the root cause of the problem and will be releasing a firmware update that rectifies the situation. We are currently running through our validation and compatibility process. Once this process is complete, the firmware will be made available to our customers. Although we understand the desire of some people to start using unreleased firmware now, we want to ensure that our solution works across multiple chipsets, systems, and operating systems before publishing the release code. We are currently targeting the week of January 16th, 2012 to publicly release the new firmware update.
We understand the impact that this is having on some users right now and apologize for this inconvenience. We appreciate your continued support, feedback, and patience as we finalize code and resolve this issue.
Since customer data is not affected and the error should be fixed by the upcoming firmware update, we’ll file this one under “More curious than serious”.
Update
A fix was released on January 13th. You can find the firmware update on Crucial’s support forum.
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