Could the issue with Sandforce controllers be related to how the controller pretty much zips/unzips data on-the-fly? That's why it performs so well with compressible data. I dunno, it just seems like you are asking for increased chance of trouble if you constantly zip/unzip the files when moving data. The marvell based drives (e.g., intel 510, crucial M4, etc.) avoid the compressing/decompressing on-the-fly, so seems that would be more robust than the sandforce approach? Is sandforce just artificially boosting the performance by this trick, at the risk of increased odds for trouble?
But is my assumption correct, is sanforce like a glorified hardware version of those old software programs that would compress your entire hard drive and use decompression/compression on-the-fly to increase storage capacity?