Quote Originally Posted by minpayne View Post
Can you guys continue the tests on the "dead" M4? Is it possible to use the official firmware update iso image burnt to disc to boot the computer and recognise the disk at all? When I accidentally deleted the firmware on my M4, I was able to force a re-write of the firmware to my M4 after a power cycling fix. I remember the parameter was -a to delete the firmware, then I power cycled it, and used parameter -u to force re-writing the firmware.
I don't think BAT has tried that per se; But word is it's extremely dead. It's extremely doubtful that the drive would show up to flash the FW if it can't be detected in the BIOS.

Quote Originally Posted by minpayne View Post
However I'd like to see another type of test, i.e. does the nand flash show significant volatility, once the MWI is exhausted? I'd like to have several SSDs of different brands/models to reach the MWI threshold then left powered off for a week or so and see if the contents are lost. By this we can know whether the "MWI Lasted" is indeed the best value to calculate the endurance.
At some point after the MWI is exhausted on a consumer drive, the NAND should retain data for a year. As more wear is incurred, that time shrinks down to just a day or two. As such, the current running drives are periodically disconnected for various periods of time to see whether data is retained. Obviously, powering off the drive for a year is out of the question, but all the drives have been taken down for retention at some point. It's not clear at what point retention goes from one year to a couple days.

My Mushkin Chronos Deluxe I was testing died before I got to the point where I was ready to disconnect the drive, but then the Chronos only lasted 50 days. The Intel 40GBs have been running the longest, and both are still able to retain data for quite some time.