I've had to tackle some nasty nasty computer issues in the past. Some have been simply a matter of reading logs and researching solutions, others have been the result of bad hardware. NEVER have had the frustration and loss of personal time of dealing with the problem I've encountered in the past 2 weeks.. on a mac nonetheless.
I'm no Apple fanboy, but I have to hold Apple blameless in this one (outside of the fact that they refuse to formally support the majority of quality 3rd party hardware.)
Problem: Boot Mac Pro with Crucial SSD as OS drive, run for an hour, machine crashes with spinning wheel of death :(
Cause: Turns out there's this weird firmware bug on my Crucial M4256GBSSD2 drive that makes the drive go unresponsive after 5000+ hours of use. So I bought the drive over the summer and my machine is a 24/7 environment for a number of reasons I won't go into here and VOILA! a time drain appears in your life. Find the problem and the solution here: http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/M4-firmware-0309-is-now-available/td-p/80286
Solution: Download and install the firmware upgrade on the drive as the link indicates. One gotcha, if you use an external usb optical drive, you'll be in for a sore surprise as the disc won't boot off of a non ide optical device... :) Gotta love this kind of crap. I swapped drives with a laptop and did the firmware upgrade there to resolve.
My main complaint, couldn't somebody at Crucial send out an freakin email about this? Did I REALLY neeed to sink 2 weeks of relentless R&D, log research, open tickets with various software vendors, etc... to find out the drive has a freakin software bug? REALLY? I've always talked Crucial up, because aside from this incident, they make really solid hardware.... but Seriously...? This really put a dent in my confidence and I'll certainly refrain from preaching Crucial as a the end-all SSD solution... What a pain in the Arse...
