*Unofficial* G.Skill Falcon SSD Firmware Upgrade Instructions

[djxp01]

the video is crystal clear ! good job ! ...

[wattgn]

I agree. I think that the method of using a jumper is incredibly poorly thought out to start with and this video is an after thought and must have taken all of five minutes to make. Very poor. Also I am wanting to upgrade the firmware as after a month of ownership I have had some serious drive errors showing up. Fortunately I am using norton ghost else I would have been in serious trouble. I still have no idea from this video of what to do.

Thanks for nothing guys.

[GSkillUSA]

@wattgn No, this is NOT an official channel. Upgrading the firmware obviously only takes 2 minutes. What difficulty are you having? The simple instructions are in the description, and they also have detailed instructions on their forum. The only reason why the video was made is because people still don't seem to understand even though they have picture by picture instructions on their website too! What don't you understand?

I can help you, just let me know. It's not rocket science. 

[wattgn]

@GSkillUSA . My computer would definitely not boot with the jumper in place. I had to remove the hard drive from the computer and I then placed the drive with the jumper in on another computer in a caddy and did it there. I read the instructions a few times and it definitely says you should be able to do this process when it is a main drive which it was. I found also that once upgraded I couldn't restore from the ghost image either so had to reinstall w7 64 bit from scratch.

[GSkillUSA]

@wattgn The SSD can not be the main drive or operating system. How is the operating system to run the firmware upgrade if you are running on it?? Disk 0 should be the SSD, Disk 1 should be another hard drive with an operating system. So you boot with Disk 1, to upgrade Disk 0.

After you flash the firmware upgrade, you still have to format the drive! The drive is bare and you have to format it so it is recognized. Win7 does that for you which is why a fresh install worked.

[wattgn]

@GSkillUSA . I think not a lot of people have a second hard drive which happens to have their OS on it so I read it differently. I assumed that the hidden partition on the drive had DOS or Linux and that it updated using that with the firmware on another hard drive. I notice vertex just suggest making a DOS bootable USB drive and put the files on that which is sensible also. The way you guys have worked it out is really not that sensible and so maybe a bit more explaination would be useful.

[wattgn]

@GSkillUSA . One more point too on this Falcon 2 drive. I upgraded because I had no choice. My computer developed serious issues less than a month after I installed it. Chkdsk revealed numerous drive errors so I thought I would upgrade the firmware before returning it to the shop. So far so good but have to say not really impressed with the product's reliability even though it works well when it is working.

[GSkillUSA]

@wattgn Guess it's somewhat confusing for basic users eh? Make sure Win7 SSD options are enabled, do NOT treat the SSD like a normal platter drive. The things Windows can do if treated like a normal HDD can destroy this SSD. Hopefully you are to maintain it. The new firmware upgrade they just released has a "clean" function, so if your drive does get corrupted on accident, you can fix it in a couple minutes. Very convenient. Once you understand how SSD's work, it's no biggy.

[wattgn]

@GSkillUSA . The references on the 'sticky' on your forum refer to tweaks for Vista and XP which really treat an SSD like any other drive as they came out before SSD's did. Windows 7 64 bit like I use though should optimise the drive automatically or so I thought. If not let me know where these options are enabled in Win 7.

[NoGufff]

Is this the official G.skill channel ? I'm sorry, but for a company like G.skill, and for something as important as firmware updating, this is very poor.

[GSkillUSA]

@NoGufff No, this is NOT an official channel.

[NoGufff]

@GSkillUSA OK, thanks. I didn't notice the *Unofficial* in the title before. No offence was intended, and I hope you can understand my point of view. Were you aware that G.skill have a link to this video on the FW update page?

[GSkillUSA]

@NoGufff Yea, I told them I would because it seemed like so many people were having a problem. Although it's not high quality and detailed, I just thought I'd do my best. Sorry, no camcorder, only Blackberry, so poor quality. Which is why I'm offering help because it is a 1:30 minute process but everybody's confused like it's rocket science. =P

[NoGufff]

@GSkillUSA O.K, I gave it a go. Ended up just installing it in another system. Upgrade_AP.exe gave me a "PASS". Does that mean I didn't need to bother with the Clean Function ?

[GSkillUSA]

@NoGufff Cool, yep, if it said PASS, then the upgrade is complete. You don't need the clean function anymore since apparently there are no bad blocks SSD. If there are ANY bad blocks, it can not upgrade firmware and it will give you the "please choose the right parameter for your SSD blah blah" errors message.

Enjoy!

[NoGufff]

@GSkillUSA .Sweat. Thanks for your replies. I've noticed a slight reduction in start up time compared to the factory FW. More noticable is resume from sleep time, down from 13 sec to 3. Can you recommend any free software to test/benchmark the perfermance of my SSD ?

[GSkillUSA]

@NoGufff HD Tune Pro, you should be able to download for free on download.com