Recently, one of my clients were reporting that they were suddenly getting frequent BSODs on one of their laptops, with the error code 0x000000F4. The client’s laptop would run normally, but suddenly would BSOD and reboot after about an hour or so of use.
The notorious 0x000000F4 BSOD.
The laptop in question was upgraded with a Crucial M4 128 GB SSD over a year ago. Being an owner of a few Crucial M4 SSD drives, I remembered that year ago, Crucial released a firmware update for the M4 series that addressed a
critical bug that would cause BSODs after 5200 hours of usage. As there were no other obvious issues with the laptop, I suspected that this was the case. Running CrystalDiskInfo, I confirmed my suspicions, as the Crucial M4 firmware version was 0001 (never updated) and had 5500 hours of usage, well past the 5200 hour mark.
Stats of a Crucial M4 128 GB SSD with over 5500 hours of usage.
I grabbed the
latest firmware for the Crucial M4 (070H as of this post) and updated the firmware on the Crucial M4 without any data loss or other issues. After completing the firmware update, the client’s laptop has been running smoothly, with no sign of any 0x000000F4 BSODs. If you are a owner of a Crucial M4, make sure that you are running at least firmware version 0309; the 5200 hour bug WILL occur on any Crucial M4 SSDs running on firmware versions prior to 0309.
