Intel has temporarily halted the shipment of its highly-praised second generation of 32nm-based Solid State Drives, which resulted in makers of competing SSDs to slash their prices across the board. The issue was confirmed by Intel to be related to a problem with data corruption, though it does not appear to be beyond the ability of a firmware patch to fix.

Basically, the data on Intel's SSD will be rendered corrupted and useless when users set a password in the BIOS for their drive, and either change or remove it later. A bug will render the SSD inoperable, and any data on it will be irrecoverable. This error does not crop up if the user does not set any password via the BIOS.

This should be quite embarrassing to Intel, which also had to release a patch for an issue which resulted in significant degradation in performance over time for the earlier X25-M solid state drive.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at DailyTech
- check out this article at The Inquirer

Related Articles:
Intel X25-M solid-state drive degrades significatly with heavy use
Computerworld reviews the X25-E solid-state drive
Intel's new X25-E Extreme SSD blows the competition away