My guess is that Intel couldn't coerce the SandForce controller into behaving nicely. Of course if anyone asks them about the behavior, it's a feature, not a bug. But really, selling almost-dead SSDs is not a big problem. These endurance tests show that you'd have to overwrite a 240GB SSD every day for 5 years before getting close to exhausting it. Drives will become obsolete before they wear out.
Last I checked, Intel used their own controllers in their enterprise SSDs. Now I wonder if their older consumer drives like the X25-M (which used in-house controllers) become read-only instead of bricking themselves.
This behavior doesn't stop you from selling an almost dead SSD. And if you sell a dead one it will be obvious that it can't be written to; that's not going to be a very convincing scam.
Sorry, clarification: "almost-dead" in this case means "on the verge of the intel software self-bricking itself" rather than the drive itself being buggered.
Based on what I read from the article it implies that at this point the drive itself MAY be ok but not reliable so the intel software pro-actively commits suicide.
Without the self-bricking you could sell a drive that has reached this point to some unsuspecting person since it ostensibly works but is unreliable, if it fails 2 months later then the seller can just deny responsibility.
Although why it 100% self-bricks instead of going into "read-only brick" mode is a good question.
Is the consumer market for second-hand drives large for them to be concerned about it? I always thought that >99% of people keep the drive their desktop/laptop came with and junk/sell/donate the whole thing without ever turning a screw. The number of people who are savvy enough to know about SSD, be willing to upgrade a drive, willing to shop for a used one vs a new one from Dell/Amazon/Newegg, and still be able to be duped might be a pretty small market.
Not to mention the number of drives bricked by overuse in the hands of unscrupulous sellers willing to put in the effort to earn a (rather pitiful) sum on the second-hand market for an outdated driver is probably... zero. Or vanishingly small, in any case.
Good point. Ok, but does Intel provide a published specification of how to send some sort of custom command to resurrect the drive in read-only mode, you know, so I can take it to a friendly geek and get my data back?
That is a good point, as long as it can only be done after it self-bricks and it only restores to read-only then I cannot see a problem with regards to my earlier point since any consumer is going to notice pretty damn quick that they cannot write to the drive.
> Intel really doesn't want its client SSDs to be used after the flash has exceeded its lifetime spec. The firm's enterprise drives are designed to remain in logical disable mode after the MWI bottoms out, regardless of whether the power is cycled. Those server-focused SSDs will still brick themselves if data integrity can't be verified, though.
You will notice that their Enterprise SSDs do not self-brick.
[EDIT] Read down for clarification regarding "almost-dead"