On Flashing OCZ Vertex 2 Firmware

April 26, 2011 at 7:58 PM

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:

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.