2 RMA'd drives now - now have a problematic Force3

Long story short - I bought a Performance 3 64GB a while back. Something failed on it twice and now I've ended up being sent a Force 3 60GB.

The price on the drive keeps going up (shipping charges) and now I'm losing GB size! Most expensive drive I've ever bought.

Anyways.

I JUST installed this Force3 in my system on a 6GB controller port. Initialize and format 32k. Guess what? System freezes AGAIN.

Not only did the system freeze but then the drive completely disappeared from disk management.

GREAT - Now I have to attempt this firmware update with the potential to brick my drive AGAIN for another possible RMA! :mad:

Hope this goes well.

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Before I do the drive update - are there ANY other suggestions?.. We'll maybe not.

I just restarted Windows, the HD light goes solid and the system is frozen. I was thinking maybe LPM issue but this is instantly after a reboot it froze.

----- 10:45AM

Trying Intel RST driver to 10.6.0.1022 first.

Event: 9, iaStor

The device, \Device\Ide\isStor0, did not respond within the timeout period..

----- 11:04AM

OK - Driver updated to 10.6.0.1022. Opened disk management and the timeout happened again.

Rebooted and freeze after Windows load happened again. Mind you - Windows is not installed on this SSD. This SDD is merely attached to another port, has zero data on it as drive letter E:.

----- 11:46AM

Motherboard BIOS updated. I found a thread talking about RST 10.6 and the bios for a Z68 chipset (which is what I have ASUS P8Z68 PRO). I updated the BIOS, got all my settings correct but the issue is still persisting. Going to do the LPM registry fix next to see what that changes. Trying to avoid drive firmware updated until last possible fix.

----- 11:58AM

Progress - after the LPM registry fix I did not have an iaStor timeout message generated. I couldn't detect any freeze during the system reboot or opening of disk management.

At this time I'm running a new BIOS for Intel RST 10.6. For Smart Response you must have 10.6.0.1091 RAID OMROM (in the Asus bios update), RST driver 10.6 and the Z68 chipset.

I have all of the above and I included the LPM registry fix and "so far" has not presented any of the freezing issues.