The second most important piece of information CDI gives us is the firmware used on the SMART/SX300. We've already documented the SandForce 5.0.1 and 5.0.2 firmware issues in the past, but to keep your head from spinning, we'll recap here. The new 5 series firmware has an issue with TRIM. Per the WHQL spec, TRIM has a 70ms window to take place, but with this firmware not all of the TRIM command is passed along. As you write to the drive you are taking up space, as you delete data, the TRIM command isn't cleansing the flash so a full read, erase cycle will take place every time you write to flash that was written to previously. The end result is slower performance than you would normally see with working TRIM in place.
We identified this issue and promptly submitted it to SandForce who then validated the problem. Since then we've had weekly updates from LSI SandForce and the fix is currently in the validation stage. To date, we've held all reviews of products shipped with 5.0.1 and 5.0.2 other than the SanDisk Extreme (where we first found the issue) and ADATA SP900 (the first RAISE free product to arrive). You might of thought we missed several launch day reviews from products like the VisionTek Race or Kingston HyperX 3K, that wasn't the case, we just shelved them until FW 5.0.3+ arrives. After bringing back a nice collection of products from Computex, we now have 19 SSDs on hold in the lab with the issue. Hopefully in the coming weeks everything will be resolved and we can get back to business as usual.