In the last 6 months we have deployed 18 M4 drives. In that time I've had 4 become unbootable (one before the 0309 firmware update, 3 after - and all 3 within 2 weeks of each other). The drives would work fine after secure wipe, or even just chkdsk /r; before sector wiping, they would report several thousand bad sectors (using chkdsk /r, but also various smartdisk utility scanners, etc.). After talking with Crucial tech support, they had the following suggestions since they don't have their own confidence test software/scan utility, smart disk monitor, etc.:
*Firmware needs to be greater than 0309, although this was done on 3 of the crashed drives before they became unbootable.
*They indicated that the default action of putting the drive to sleep during idle can cause the drive to lose information in memory but not committed to disk. I personally think this is bogus, I can't believe that Windows wouldn't power down a device without issuing a cache purge command; let alone a drive that was idle for 20 minutes wouldn't have done background cleanup of cache entries, but whatever, they indicated this could be a problem. Solution: set drive idle to "never" for battery and powered settings (not a big deal, SSDs don't consume much power when idle - just tech time to touch each system's config).
*They said that each drive ships with a certain amount of bad sectors out of the factory, that may or may not be picked up by the OS as part of formatting. The drives should be formatted, then scanned for bad sectors before put into use (chkdsk /r). Really? Why wouldn't sectors be remapped during (full, not quick) format or writing data to disk, let alone when we encrypt the drives?
*Having partitions that are not 4k aligned can cause excessive wear on the disks, turn off defrag scheduled task, etc. (this is true for all SSDs). That said, all drives that crashed already had this config.
I'm not really happy with this response - it indicates a lack of planning for default config for things like cache purging (who doesn't have caps that allow cache eviction on powerdown?) or good use of idle time - it's idle for 20 minutes before powerdown!
We'll be going with the Samsung 870/830 disks to see if we get better reliability for our drives. SF solution isn't a great choice since we encrypt the drives. We don't expect anyone will ship "perfect" drives, we would just be happy with sub 1%-2% failure rates.
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