This situation is strange if you look at the short history of the SanDisk Extreme SSD. It was released in February of 2012, and had its one and only firmware update in May, 2012. The firmware update tool was fairly simple to use, and created the bootable USB flash drive used to perform the update just by running a program. The update ran fine in my experience, perfectly. My point is this was not some last minute, rush job that made the user jump through hoops, it was obviously done well.
Given the current situation, nothing happening (yet), there must be something going on that is causing this delay. I don’t mean SanDisk sitting on their hands either. We may never know what happened to cause the delay, but I would bet that this is not simply SanDisk blowing off their customers (although it may seem like that to you), something is behind this.
Just an FYI, the following is what another SSD manufacture posted in their forum as the “Change Log” for the 5.03 firmware:
Here is the 5.03 firmware update for 22** series SandForce based drives…
CHANGE LOG
1. Restored a minor TRIM performance variation from a previous release
2. Fixed a power management condition where the device failed to respond to COMWAKE, which might have resulted in the SSD not responding without being reset by the host
I suppose we could not expect more than that, but yet another example of saying as little as possible. The source of this statement is unknown, could be SandForce, the SSD manufacture, someone else, who knows?
This one really surprised me, from a tech support person in that manufacturer’s forum:
TRIM does not function properly with any SF 5.** series firmware prior to 5.03 according to this site:
http://www.rwlabs.com/article.php?id=692
They have done testing to prove this.
That was the entire post, verbatim. Notice they never say themselves it was an issue, someone else said the problem existed. But it was proved by testing… again, not the manufacture, the third party. No statement was issued that the manufacture verified the problem existed or was fixed.
This must be done for legal reasons. If you admit it, you are then responsible, if you don’t, you’re not, and fine.
Remember early in 2011 when Intel had the problem in the 6 series chipsets, that some of the SATA ports could fail over time with normal use? They announced (admitted) it, recalled and replaced boards and compensated manufactures, etc. I think it cost them about one billion dollars. See the difference?
If you’re waiting for SanDisk or any other company to “admit” this issue exists, you’ll be waiting forever.