Patriot Torqx M28 Firmware

[Patriot_Ben]

Hey Guys,

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but I just found out from the flash team that we will not be offering firmware upgrades for the M28 drives. Because our builds differed slightly from other companies, firmware flashes was not compatible on all M28 drives and in some cases made the drive more unstable and slower.

I tested a few different Samsung based SSDs like the M28 from patriot in Windows 7 64-bit. In my research, I found the M28 overall to be more stable and faster, at least in the way I use it, than some of the other SSDs I looked at that were more expensive. I chose the Samsung controller because I like the company and the fact that they like to test things thouroughly before releasing them and have good overall performance.

This is the reason why some our M28 tends to be a little more stable, and faster than other Samsung drives on the market. The M28's were designed to be ready from the gate, and we tried to design the drive optimal for most systems out there without firmware upgrades being necessary.

With that being said, please rest assured that we stand by these drives 100%. Should you encounter any problems whatsover please don't hesitate to contact us for any kind of exchange.

[bmoses]

I have to admit that I'm kinda bummed about that news, but if the drive stands up to the riggers of daily use without problems then I'm satisfied.

I would, however, like to know more about the GC/NTFS function and I'd really love to find some sort of app or utility that could tell me the state of the drive and this function. Surprisingly I'm having a hard time finding information on this specific function. Any more information would be greatly appreciated.

I'll periodically benchmark my drive (something I never used to do with HDDs) and see if I can detect a noticeable decline in performance over time.

[mdzcpa]

I have to admit that I'm kinda bummed about that news, but if the drive stands up to the riggers of daily use without problems then I'm satisfied.

I would, however, like to know more about the GC/NTFS function and I'd really love to find some sort of app or utility that could tell me the state of the drive and this function. Surprisingly I'm having a hard time finding information on this specific function. Any more information would be greatly appreciated.

I am a bit disappointed as well. I would also like to know if there is an app of any kind that can monitor the effectiveness of the hardware based garbage collection of the Samsung controller. Aside from the article from PCPerspective that magic-man linked here in the forums, I have seen no other references or specifications anywhere.

Patriot_Ben: You should really post a dedicated thread about the "no firmware upgrade" for the M28 SSDs and sticky it. You should also include some kind of brief explanation about the hardware based garbage collection in the Samsung controller. This will head off a lot of questions and hopefully keep some disappointed customers from becoming too unhappy.

[bmoses]

Patriot_Ben: First I want to thank you for being forthcoming with your information. That in itself is priceless. Aside from the dissapointment of there being no official FW upgrades available from Patriot for these drives, could there be a discussion "offline" about which particular drives could benefit from an update? You mentioned that only some drives took a performance hit. Were other drives ok or enhanced? I would understand if this proposition would not be considered appropriate.

[mikeproctor]

Hey Guys,

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but I just found out from the flash team that we will not be offering firmware upgrades for the M28 drives. Because our builds differed slightly from other companies, firmware flashes was not compatible on all M28 drives and in some cases made the drive more unstable and slower.

So is there no way to bring back performance on these drives? If we repartition and reinstall will it do any good or make it worse? I'm on a mac and not running ntfs.

[magic-man]

I too would like to know what hardware combos gave an issue. FOR ME, I was able to update and get better performance. BUT... I did a lot of research on my HP DV7-2270US Chipset and found that if you have the Intel ICH AHCI drivers installed (Matrix storage Manager) that TRIM would not work. I set the controller to use the Microsoft AHCI drivers and now everything works just great! If there is an issue with NVidia chipset ones, there is a hidden service pack to resolve the problem (mainly for USB issues)...

Like I said, given the combos that do and don't work, we can come up with ways to help the engineers overcome the issues.

FWIW, The main reason that I tried it, is that I needed it for deployed laptop that runs very secure software but doesn't stay on long enough for normal garbage collection to run....
Do I think that the average user whose machine is on most of the day needs TRIM in Windows 7? No... The built-in auto-trim works just fine!

And Ben.... Thanks for telling us.... Always stinks being the bearer of bad news...

[drexyl]

I have seen a lot of different posts about the m28, Garbage Collection and TRIM. In no case have I seen anyone mention the version of firmware they are currently running.

I bought an m28 128GB SSD in early December, 2009. When I checked to make sure it had the latest firmware update before using it, I found that the firmware in my "Brand New" SSD was outdated in June 2009. My m28 has Firmware version VBM 1801Q. All m28 SSD's made since last summer have firmware version VBM 18C1Q.

From my research, I discovered that version of firmware that I have does NOT support either Garbage Collection or TRIM. The newer version VBM
18C1Q does support GC, but not TRIM.

I have written to Patriot Tech Support 3 times and have so far been given the runaround. I don't think I am being unreasonable with my request to get a copy of the VBM 18C1Q firmware. The third time I asked Patriot for help, I got a different Tech who promised to look into the issue. That was over 2 weeks ago.

All I asked for was either: a copy of firmware version VBM 18C1Q, or ann RMA number so I can send my "Brand New" SSD back to get it upgraded or replaced. This is not rocket science.
Patriot has said: (quoted from a post by Patriot_Ben on the 12 of this month)

This is the reason why some our M28 tends to be a little more stable, and faster than other Samsung drives on the market. The M28's were designed to be ready from the gate, and we tried to design the drive optimal for most systems out there without firmware upgrades being necessary.

With that being said, please rest assured that we stand by these drives 100%. Should you encounter any problems whatsover please don't hesitate to contact us for any kind of exchange.

If the drives were designed to be "ready From The Gate", why the hell did Patriot have to update the firmware from VBM 1801Q to 18C1Q?? Obviously they have a copy of the new flash, and the m28 WAS NOT designed without firmware upgrades being necessary or they wouldn't have had to upgrade it!

Has anyone else had the misfortune to purchase an m28 Torx recently with the outdated firmware, or am I just extremely unluck?? I would be very interested to see just exactly what firmware revisions do exist out there. If anyone has an m28 with a different firmware rev from 1801Q or 18C1Q ( such as the 19C1Q) I would be very interested in knowing!

[magic-man]

Running 19C1Q against advise of patriot_ben...
All is well....
FWIW, TRIM in Win 7 is way overrated. The GC works better, especially if you logoff and let the machine sit at the logon screen for 20-30 minutes to force GC.

[bmoses]

I bought an m28 at the beginning of Jan, thinking it was an Indilinx as well. I had no idea the little "m28" meant so much. Anyway, it came with 18C1Q. I plan on updating pretty soon, but I'm letting magic-man be the gineau pig. The FW update is available on Samsung's website. Check the sticky at the top of this forum.

Which brings me to a few questions for magic. Magic, how do you know the things you know about this drive? What leads you to say that GC is better than TRIM. (Trust me, I want to believe you because I'm not running 7, but I just don't want to believe false or untrue statements). How do you know that the GC function runs when at the logon screen? Is this your best guess because it might be when there is the least amount of disk activity? Could GC also run while just sitting at the desktop of a logged in user? Do we know what triggers GC on this drive? I've been looking for all of this info but cannot find it.

[magic-man]

I bought an m28 at the beginning of Jan, thinking it was an Indilinx as well. I had no idea the little "m28" meant so much. Anyway, it came with 18C1Q. I plan on updating pretty soon, but I'm letting magic-man be the gineau pig. The FW update is available on Samsung's website. Check the sticky at the top of this forum.

Which brings me to a few questions for magic. Magic, how do you know the things you know about this drive? What leads you to say that GC is better than TRIM. (Trust me, I want to believe you because I'm not running 7, but I just don't want to believe false or untrue statements). How do you know that the GC function runs when at the logon screen? Is this your best guess because it might be when there is the least amount of disk activity? Could GC also run while just sitting at the desktop of a logged in user? Do we know what triggers GC on this drive? I've been looking for all of this info but cannot find it.

I did a lot of research on these drives in the samsung forums. GC is better than trim, because the OS is not used used to make it work (except for maintaining NTFS). Trim helps some and works along with GC by telling the controller it is free to use a cell before GC figures it out anyway. I figured out the logoff thing by watching the IO going to the drive in resource viewer. Figured out that the logging features of Win7 are almost nothing when logged off since nothing is runnning (well, almost nothing). A lot of it was by trial and error.
For example, here is one for you... NEVER NEVER NEVER run the tony-trim thing unless you want to have the slowest M28 out there for a few hours! Left it at the logon screen for 3 hours to get things back to normal after restoring the backup image.
I am no expert, but I learn fast... Even stumbled on a way by accident to do all reads from a virtual machine (vmware) on the SSD and send ALL writes to the other HDD in the laptop... Basically it made sort of a raid 0 in the VM, making it even faster. Just merge the snapshot once a week for safety and to keep it fast. Way cool using the VM and seeing the reads come from the SSD (225 MBS) and the HD (110 MBS) at the same time in the laptop and all those little writes go to the HDD, By the way, runnng this way lets you see how much is written by XP in a VM... TONS!

BUT throughout ALL experiments I have always maintained a current (less than 1 day old) image of the SSD on the HD, just in case.
When I mess up, thinngs are restored to normal in about 10 minutes.