Matthias Hamann’s Blog

About a year ago, I bought a SSD drive to get rid of the noise which my ThinkPad’s original hard drive constantly produced during file access. While the sound issue disappeared as expected, I now faced an even bigger problem. The MasterDrive’s random write performance was an absolute nightmare. Even in every-day-situations like opening several Internet Explorer tabs at the same time massive stuttering occurred, thereby making it impossible to use the computer for periods of 10 to 30 seconds. Moreover, copying large files to the SSD rendered the computer totally unusable until the process was finished. Given the fact that I paid almost 400 Euros for the drive, such a behavior was totally unacceptable and I even thought about using my old hard drive again.

In July, I was hoping to fix the stuttering issue by installing a new firmware upgrade, provided on Super Talent’s website. So I went through the arduous process of backing up my drive, upgrading the firmware and restoring the backup as the upgrade needs to format the whole SSD. But when I rebooted, several Windows programs still reported the old firmware version and the stuttering hadn’t vanished at all.

Therefore, I was rather skeptical when I found out last week that there was another firmware upgrade available. But as the constant stuttering was driving me nuts, I decided to give it one more try. I performed the above-mentioned procedure once again and … the stuttering was almost gone! Now I can even copy files and use my computer at the same time, which is something that I couldn’t dream of before the firmware upgrade. Except in rare conditions, the SSD now works like my old notebook hard drive, only a little faster and almost noiseless.

So to all of those out there who suffer from the same annoying stuttering issue of their SSD, I strongly advise to upgrade the drive’s firmware. In case of my MasterDrive OX the current version number is 090508s.