Poor Crucial. Although it started its C300 campaign on the right foot, posting some very impressive sequential read speeds thanks to 6Gbps SATA and ONFI 2.0 NAND, things haven't been so smooth lately.

First off, Crucial's timing was unfortunate as it was right around the time we started seeing SandForce make some noise. Secondly, while performance was good, my drive showed some performance and reliability issues within two weeks of receiving it. And third, the firmware update that was supposed to address the problems I had managed to brick some drives. 

If you bought a C300 there was a chance that your drive would brick itself by just using it. If you used the firmware that fixed the aforementioned problem, then there was a chance the process would brick your drive. 

Crucial just gave me an update on the situation and things appear to be looking up:

Back in March I posted an update on my experiences with Crucial's RealSSD C300. In it I pointed out that not only had my review sample apparently bricked itself but I was also able to get the C300 into a state of extremely low performance (~20MB/s) that it could not get out of, even if I TRIMed the whole drive.

Crucial discovered the source of the problems and promised a fix in mid April. It's a bit later than that but we do finally have an update from Crucial. An updated fw has been posted to Crucial's site (Version 0002) and it promises the following fixes:

 Change Log:

• Improved Power Consumption
• Improved TRIM performance
• Enabled the Drive Activity Pin (Pin 11)
• Improved Robustness due to unexpected power loss
• Improved data management to reduce maximum write latency
• Improved Performance of SSD as it fills up with data
• Improved Data Integrity

The update is destructive so you'll lose all of your data when you apply it. I haven't had the opportunity to test it thoroughly yet so if you're concerned, you may want to wait until others have used it. If you are a C300 owner, please feel free to leave your experiences with the update in the comments below.

Update: It seems as though the new firmware, designed to prevent drives from bricking, appears to be bricking drives. Hold off on this one guys.

I've also requested a 128GB C300 for review and I should see that in the coming days. I've got a ton of non-SSD stuff to deal with this week so I'm not sure I'll be able to get to all of it before I leave for Spain this weekend. If I can't get it done before I leave, I'll definitely tackle it all when I get back.