not trying to debate/argue about it and was simply responding to your many assumptions made in the post quoted above(regardless of the posted topic. And I too have been studying SF based drives even prior to introduction almost 1 1/2 years ago and from 2nd day of release during ownership.
I have 6 Vertex 2's in R0 and 1 Vertex 3 on this system alone along a few other friends and family who run them problem free as well. So, yes.. running a Sandforce can be done if certain limitations are factored in. IMHO, those consistently sleeping the first gen SF drives are just sitting on ticking timebomb's as it can take many month's for something to go wrong and knock you on your ass if no backups are made(which still amazes me how few actually backup. I'm absolutely positive that the elimination of sleep transitions(ESPECIALLY S3 since it cuts power to the drive) from all the SF drives I have installed to date?.. is the key to long-term stability.
And despite the fact that I do actually like Intel?.. they are not flawless either as there are still quite a few posts around the net of lost drives(I killed 1 myself during testing and a friend lost 1 as well) and even this new platform has seen stuttering/freezing issues with those controllers. Sandforce just has so many other interaction issues it's not even funny and creates far more stress(in the matter of the newer 6G drives) on other hardware due to pushing the sata channels speed to near maximum capability.
Either way you look at it.. I was not trying to sell anything here or do any type of damage control since I don't own stock or have any vested interest in the company.. I just test their drives and report what I see as weakness or fault.
I will say again however.. when a drive which is causing issues on a particular system and assumed to be completely defective is simply swapped to another similarly equipped system and regains complete stability?.. might want to look a bit deeper at the possible background causes involved. Just my personal opinion based on beta-testing results, some inside info, and firsthand witness of problem resolutions from the various SSD mfgrs forums who use this new controller. From there.. a quick search of "P67 crashes and freezes" will lead you to all major mobo mfgrs forums to shed the rest of the light on a few dirty little sectrets that most don't usually get a glimpse of before lumping SF related issues into one big messy "anti-OCZ" campaign.
So, in a nutshell after all that?.. you will surely see OCZ using/recommending whatever means that has proven effective for even a handful of users, simply because they are trying to help troubleshoot many differnet issues here all at once to better pinpoint where the majority of issues may lie. That's one of the major differences between OCZ and the others, IMHO. They typically go out on a limb further than any other mfgr(the transparency of the forum itself is a testament to that fact) and try and help troubleshoot system stability issues without just pointing you to the mobo mfgr or MS technet to get it sorted. And that has without a doubt.. enabled many others to hang on those "problem resolution coattails" and benefit from the firmware workarounds and fixes created and hatched from such a pro-active forum environment.
Personally I can't help but think the SATA III spec was rushed, as is always the case with specs like these, but more critical was the fact that so little time passed between the release of the spec and the availability of drives that could actually saturate the very limits of the spec.
If you look at specs like USB, ATA-133, SATA I, and so on, the upper-limits of the spec were defined from day one but there were no devices available to actually test that corner case.
So early implementations of those specs could have some "incompatibility" issues that simply never materialized into a concern at the consumer level because our spindle-drives at the time had no chance of taking the system to its limits.
But SATA III came out and quite literally right on its heels were SSD's drives pushing it to the absolute limit.
Now we have all these issues. I don't think it is a coincidence. I think once the SATA III chipset designers and manufacturers get a few more product revs under their belts, a few more learning cycles and real-world feedback, they will have the capability of designing robust and fully-capable systems, from the chipset to the mobo trace layout to the cables themselves, and these sorts of random oddities experienced with drives that push right to the edge of the spec will disappear.
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