Scrambled Flash

I killed my Sony DVD R/RW drive last Friday. I had just downloaded and was applying a factory-supplied firmware upgrade that would turn my double-speed drive into a quad-speed demon. However, the Flash updater, running under Windows XP, died in the middle of the operation. (Windows crashed! What a surprise!) The result: scrambled Flash and a dead drive. A little Googling on the Internet established that the drive was most likely dead. Permanently. A help email to Sony is as yet unanswered so today, I replaced the drive with a Plextor PX-716A from Surplus Computers, which is conveniently located just down the street. Works like a champ, although the external drive box now looks funny, with Sony silkscreened on the top and Plextor silkscreened on the front.

The developers of the Sony drive who created a design that can be permanently disabled by an aborted Flash update need some remedial system-design training. An official download from the Sony support Web site applied by a reasonably competent operator (my engineering skills aren't all that decrepit) should not be able to destroy the drive. Yet that's what happened.

This episode holds an important lesson for all system designers: design for contingencies and expect Murphy to visit. The lesson is no less true for SOC designers as it is for board-level designers. Expect the unexpected and don't let the fates turn your design into junk.