One of our Dell Latitude E7240 exhibited strange mSATA SSD behaviour. Disk requests didn’t complete on time. This computer ran the A13 firmware. The case was eventually solved by upgrading to the A21 firmware executed from an USB stick as the mSATA SSD was unreliable at this point. Apparently, the A18 firmware corrected some mSATA […]

Read More → Strange mSATA SSD behaviour on Dell Latitude E7240

Over the last few days have I experimented with UEFI and GPT in VirtualBox 4.3.26. The goal was to multiboot various operating system, in this case Windows 10 Enterprise Technical Preview 9926 x64 and FreeBSD/amd64 stable/10. First, I thought of persuading the UEFI firmware to always present its boot menu. It sure beats remembering to […]

Read More → UEFI, GPT, Windows 10, FreeBSD 10, and rEFInd

I find it curious as to why most, if not all, SSD manufacturers are unwilling to disclose the physical disk, the page, and the erase block sizes selected for their SSD products. Such crucial information should be readily available to guide us, the more advanced users, to properly align our partitions and configure efficiency in […]

Read More → SSD manufacturers: Wake up!