@Christopher -- yep, I have read at least most of this entire thread! I was refering to your Mushkin Chronos Deluxe when talking about the toggle NAND drives being slightly faster.

To be honest, I'm a bit of a fan of the sandforce drives .... I like their approach to reducing write amplification and the ability to run without a DRAM cache. Now, that isn't to say that other drives are bad, or that there is nothing to fault sandforce with. (as the crucial m4 and intel 320 drives are quite excellent, and the sandforce drives have certainly had their fair share of problems) I guess the main attraction was that they were the first company outside of intel to really work on a drive design that didn't suck (like the jmicron and barefoot based drives did)