Asus G73JW SSD woes

Hi,

I have an Asus G73JW laptop with two drive bays and I have been trying to get it to work with SSDs for a while now.

I first bought a Mushkin SSD which worked for a while in the G73JW but then suddenly disappeared from view in the BIOS. I thought it was broken but I transferred it to my MSI netbook where it has run fine ever since.

After that I put an OCZ Vertex 2 120GB into the Asus, and that ran fine for several months, but then I started getting warnings about the ATA controller being slow to respond, and Windows started taking minutes to boot, and eventually the drive could not be read. I took it out and tested it in my desktop computer, which could read the drive fine. It was invisible to the Asus laptop though, even in the BIOS.

Like a sucker I thought maybe I got unlucky a couple of times and I put a 256GB OCZ Vertex 4 in there. (I know the laptop can't use SATA III but that's fine, I thought I could transfer the drive to a new machine if I upgraded to a new laptop later.) The Asus would only recognize the Vertex 4 in one of the drive bays, so I put it in there with an HDD in the other bay. (The HDD holds my data, which is why I am not going crazy by this point.) The Vertex 4 ran fine for a month and a bit, then I got the same slow Windows boot, ATA controller being slow to respond, and eventually SSD being invisible even to the BIOS. The BIOS and the SSD were both on the latest firmwares. I pulled the drive and tested it in other machines and it was completely dead, so I returned it and got a new one under warranty.

In the meantime I happened to have another 256GB Vertex 4 around that I had not got around to putting into another machine. I put it in the Asus. The same thing happened: 1 month of no problems, then from the first signs of slowdown to total disappearance even from BIOS within a few hours. And it was also completely dead, invisible to other computers too. I returned this one for a replacement too.

Now I'm feeling a bit silly by this point. So I have two 256GB OCZ Vertex 4s sitting around unused, and I put a WD Black HDD into the Asus. So far so good with that one, for about 3 weeks now. The speed difference is really not that bad. But I'm nervous in case the laptop learns to kill HDDs too.

This whole process has gone on for about 20 months, with the Asus burning through the Vertex 4 SSDs in about 6 weeks each. But I'm wondering what on earth is going on with the G73JW and SSDs. The two Vertex 4s were left totally broken, while the Vertex 2 still seems to work in other machines (but not the G73JW) and the Mushkin is still going strong in the netbook. Can the laptop just be incompatible with SSDs, or do I perhaps have a motherboard problem, or are these models of SSDs just horribly unreliable, or have I been unlucky?

The reason I'm asking is that I am considering whether to get rid of the Vertex 4s or put them into another machine, possibly in RAID 0. If the answer is that OCZ Vertex 4s are just flaky, then I won't take the risk of doing that. But if the G73JW is known to have issues with SSDs, or if there's a reasonable explanation as to how it could have burned through so many of them, then the drives might still be worth keeping and using.

Anyone have any thoughts about what is going on here?

Thanks!