Intel 320 Series 600 GB SATA 3.0 Gb-s 2.5-Inch Solid-State Drive

The model I bought was the 300GB. I installed it as a second hard drive on my OWC data doubler equipped early 2011 17 inch Macbook Pro. The boot drive was a factory installed 128 GB Apple (Toshiba) SSD while the Intel 320 will act as a container for my files. I do a lot of video editing on the go for a living, not the fancy kind you see in Hollywood but for education, businesses and legal documentation so its pretty obvious I need to move quite a lot of video footage that are gigabytes worth of data.I used to do my video editing on a quad core i7 iMac equipped with a regular hard drive and I can really feel the difference in saving, duplicating files, and basically moving them around. I don't really know how fast this SSD is objectively but it does feels twice as fast as the iMac's 7200 RPM drive and I'm very satisfied with that. I'm not really a techie but I have been learning from my geekier friends and they all recommend Intel vs the faster SSD out there such as the OCZ drives because of reliability. Well, I have been hammering this SSD with gigabytes of video footage everyday, filling to capacity it at times, transferring raw footage back and forth to my external firewire drives for over 6 months already and so far it still works perfectly.I'm sorely tempted to upgrade to the 600GB version in the future when the budget permits. So far I have nothing but good things to say.

I used this drive in a late 2008 Unibody Macbook Pro. Works great, and made me go from cursing my slow Macbook, to marveling at it's speed!There have been various reports on the internet of this drive having various issues, but I've had none. After several years of use, more than 4,000 hours of power on use, 2500 power cycles, 50 unsafe shutdowns, and 6TB of writes, I still have 100% of my drive life left, according to SMART. If I can sustain my current use patterns, the write endurance of this drive should last 20-50 years......longer than the life of the laptop.

This drive is expensive, but if you want a big uptick in computer performance and reliability, it is worth it. The software with it makes it easy to install, and has cut bootup time and the time to start up programs by 25% or more (My rough estimate). It seems to work very well so far, and I saved the old drive as a extra file space drive. Other than the price, I have no complaints--only praise for this.

I had three Intel 320 600GB drives, including the two warranty replacements I received over the course of about 1.5 years. All three failed with the 8MB bug, even after applying the firmware updates to supposedly fix the 8MB bug.It is obvious from dealing with Intel customer support that they have absolutely no intention of fixing the issue, which makes me suspect it's in the actual hardware, nor do they care about your data one scrap. Each time I called the first thing they suggested was doing a secure erase - i.e. completely wiping the drive, which also destroys any chance of data recovery.I finally obtained a refund from Intel and purchased a non-Intel drive, after having to pay for data recovery on the third failure due to my backup being about 2 days out of date. Thank goodness that I otherwise had a robust backup solution in place.Intel deserve a class action over this product, it is fundamentally flawed and only a matter of time before it loses all of your data. The reliability is far worse than any platter drive, despite Intel's claims about reliability. In 15 years I have never experienced an IT product which could so catastrophically lose your all of your data multiple times.