So right off I just want to say, my post comes across way more confrontational than intended lol ;). So fair enough as far as pointing things out and perspective. Nothing personal, nothing mean, ect. I actually do appreciate the comments and input :). 'Tis the joy of online forums, so much of a conversation can be lost over text!
So far as all SSDs having performance drop over time, very fair comment. That said personally I’d expect a little more than a month before seeing such a major drop. A year? 2 years? I can’t remember off the top of my head but for example if the warrenty is 3 years (I think it’s 4?) personally I’d expect it to keep up a reasonable level at least that long, depending on usage of course. Plus this is also where over provisioning comes in. For example the Intel 330 180GB SSD I replaced the sandisk drive with actually has 192GB of NAND in it. As blocks are retired, it uses some of these extra NAND blocks to maintain performance. Since SanDisk is using 120GB, 240GB and 480GB my guess is they are also using provisioning otherwise they’d *likely* be 128, 256 and 512 drives (hopefully with RAISE functionality too lol).
I’d really like to know what actually happened, such as a bad version was distributed to the manufactures by mistake or (purely speculation!!) knowingly sabotaged by a SandForce employee.
I hadn’t even considered this possibility! for sure, completely speculation, but an interesting scenario non-the-less! Continuing with that line of thinking, it’s a complete craps shoot on whether or not Sandforce would come out and admit to that… The public’s response could go either way.
Not to argue or disagree with you, but what do you think happened? Such as, they knew about it but said nothing and hoped no one would notice until they had a fix? It does make you wonder how much testing companies actually do, or do they assume that the product they purchased is fine and does not need much testing.
In all honesty, I have no idea. I have my theory’s but I’ll be the first to admit that’s all they are. That said, there has been a growing trend where these large companies have been using their customers as guinea pigs. And don’t get me wrong, I get why. Really, Apple has the least amount of work to do… they have set systems with limited hardware options (for the most part, but that has been changing since they switched to intel systems… just slowly) and set drivers. There are only so many hardware configurations that are even possible. Where as with “normal” PCs just about anyone and their dog can slap a system together and hope to hell everything is compatible (this is why I refuse to pick on Microsoft as trendy as that might be in some circles).
1) So did Sandforce not find the issue… I doubt it, but that is possible. It would show they’re not testing (or not testing enough) though.
2) If they did find the TRIM bug, they might have decided the cost of a recall or producing new firmware was more than the cost of expected returned drives. Lets face it, the majority of people would never find the issue because they just don’t care to look for it. This type of person is perfectly happy knowing they have a SSD and “those are crazy fast” and only taking it that far ;).
3) Maybe the drive manufacturers did know about the issue and decided to wait and see how many people were effected and in what way before working on some type of a patch? Or to pass the information on to Sandforce so they can work on it.
4) Maybe some of the manufacturers are trying to get access to the Sandforce Base Code to write their own drivers from the ground up?
