On Flashing OCZ Vertex 2 Firmware
I recently bought a MacBook Pro (no, my opinions haven't changed) for iOS development. With it, I bought a shiny new SSD. As it shipped, I read nasty reports of a firmware bug that caused the drive to freeze or lose data when awaking from sleep/hibernate in OSX. Yikes!
My drive arrived and did indeed have the affected firmware. There was an updated version, but OCZ does not make a firmware upgrade tool for OSX. And even outside of OSX, the process is not straightforward.
What didn't work:
- Plugging the drive into a machine running Windows. The NVIDIA nForce drivers that my motherboard use prevent the tool from detecting the drives.
- Plugging the drive in and booting into Linux (at least initially). The tool reports the drive as locked or frozen, and asks for a power cycle. Reboot and retry as one might, the message remains the same. Early investigations led me to believe this was due to an old BIOS.
- Booting into an Ubuntu Live CD on a 2011 MacBook Pro and flashing from there. Most Live CDs can't even detect the DVD drive and boot. The ones that can don't detect either network interface, and Internet access is required by the tool.
The solution:
Use Linux, either a Live CD or a full installation. When the drive appears as locked/frozen, suspend the computer and wake it up again. Or even plug the drive in after booting up, although this seems marginally risky for drives that already contain data. Either of these should trick the drive into unfreezing (I only verified the first).
Simple, yet unintuitive.
