Intel had a superior product with the Gen 1 SSDs, back when the competitors were mostly shipping with buggy controllers that would randomly brick or have hideous performance issues.

Intel never followed up on their SSD controllers for the second generation though, and instead just bought the same chips everyone else did, eliminating any advantage in buying the Intel drive. Samsung stovepipes their SSD manufacturing and have managed to put out a superior product.

My Gen 1 Intel SSD showed up as 8MB one day... while only from my own pov (literally a couple days after the original 1yr warranty), I would disagree with their presumed superiority. For the past few years been mostly Samsung and Corsair drives though.

This was back when Intel drives had less than 1% return rate, and where certain OCZ drive models had a staggering 40% return rate. http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/292159-32-return-rate-craz...

OCZ then went bankrupt, which probably helped the whole SSD industry.

Fair enough... that said, it didn't make me happy to be part of that 1%. Especially with the really short initial warranty period. Of course after I'd trashed it, a few months later there was apparently a flash/fix for the issue. My first drive was too small though (iirc 32-40gb), but man did I get use to mklink commands...