Samsung P-SSD1800 Firmware update

Update 2013: My SSD died and I replaced it with CF card. For more info check out my blog post.

Last weekend I had to work all day on my Acer Aspire One AOA110. That's roughly 12 hours of painful waiting for the slow SSD to finish the simple tasks I was doing! At some point that day I started searching on the internet for a solution to this agony and found a firmware update to my Samsung P-SSD1800 8GB SSD. The update is for 8 and 16 GB variants, so AOA150 can flash it too. I did not rush into doing it because I knew I'd lose all of my info (not that you could store a lot on 8GB :D). It wasn't till today that I flashed it and I'm impressed by the results!

Here you can see the test before the update:

Here is the same test after the update:

As you can see, burst rate is doubled, access time is nearly twice faster and the drive now keeps much stable read speed! Write speeds are not tested, as that would have destroyed all my info, but I bet they are better, too. Note before the update the drive was called P-SSD1800, where after the update it's PATA SSD - that's normal. My original FW version was ver2.Y0C. The new one is ver2.M0J. So, if for some reason you already have this version, there is no need to flash it. Ok, let's get to the flashing part!

Things you'll need:
1. A flash drive.
2. HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool, Rufus or other utility that can make your flash drive DOS bootable.
3. AOA110SSDFWv1.rar, containing needed files to create DOS boot disk with HP USB tool, and the firmware itself.

Steps:
1. Backup things from your SSD and flash drive as both will be erased during this operation!
2. Insert the flash drive into one of your USB ports and run the utility from 2. above.
3. Format the drive with FAT32 file system and create a DOS startup disk using the files extracted from AOA110SSDFWv1.rar
4. After the disk is created, copy all the contents of AOA110SSDFWv1.rar to it, ignoring conflicts.
5. Reboot and boot from USB flash drive.
6. You'll have two choices now - (0) Erase SSD and (1) Flash SSD FW - choose (0) Erase SSD
7. This will trigger another dialog with options (0) Erase good Block only and (1) Force Erase All block - choose (0) Erase good Block only
8. After the erase you'll get "OK SSD is erased now time for Flash" and only one option to choose - (0) Flash SSD FW. Choose it :)
9. Another dialog (and the last of that type) shows with options (0) 8GB SSD and (1) 16GB SSD - choose the one right for your SSD. In my case this is 0, as I have 8GB version.
10. After that, the main window of the flasher program will be loaded. You need to press Enter once to start the process of updating. Some lines will start showing in the right side of the window and when all is done, you'll get big green PASS in the bottom left corner of your screen.
11. After that press X on your keyboard to exit the program.
12. Reboot PC and install your OS of choice.

Here is a video (thanks Simon Holland) of the final stage of the flashing procedure

Hope you can get better results than mine ;)

Update: I got this firmware update working on 16GB model. It failed 2 times, but eventually on the 3rd time it flashed successfully. Here are the results:

Before

After

Sorry about the warning balloon - I noticed it too late to test again. As you can see here we don't have such a boost, but in my opinion the SSD is feeling better with the new firmware ;)

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