IIRC, Tony has stated that the Vertex LE is the only SandForce drive which has a completely transparent SMART statistic for life throttling. As in it will actually tell you explicitly when it is in the throttled state. Unfortunately I don't think he said which SMART attribute it was. But I already see some interesting ones there like "wear range delta". Instead of running Anvil's app for a long time, you could just run it for a short time to see if the drive does anything interesting. The SF-1500 was considered "enterprise" class I believe. So it could be interesting for getting a better look up SandForce's skirt. How much would you be willing to abuse it in the name of science? I'd at least take a close look at every smart value you can find and see how they change with use.