Was my ssd bought used?

[idata]

i bought a intel ssd from provantage for 230 dollars. 80gb ssd gen 2 drive

i was wondering for the people who bought it, was the back of the drive look like smugged, because my drive looks like it was painted bad in the factory or something.It was packaged seal and came with all the stuff an OEM ssd should come with.

This is wat is looks like

http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/6973/dsc02404a.jpg http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/6973/dsc02404a.jpg

they said they can Rma it and it would come in FEBUARY -_-

[idata]

That finish on the metal casing is normal - mine was the same. It doesn't *look* good, but I don't care how it looks as long as it performs awesomely

Think of it as a byproduct of the fabrication and cleaning process. You can either have a bit of a smudgy look on the case, or you can pay 40 cents more for some employee in Taiwan/China/Singapore/etc to spend two minutes sanding and cleaning it, plus perhaps another USD$20,000 for the equipment, floor space, water, electricity and heating costs associated with it.

Short answer: suck it up, your SSD will still be awesome

[idata]

Doesn't look too good. See if you can find evidence of use inside the screw holes. If the thread is damaged or scratched, the drive has been mounted before. Also look for scratches on the gold plated connector fingers. I can't see that too well on the photo. You may have received a drive that someone else RMA'd.

On the other hand, it could be that the factory is running at 110% production capacity and the paint didn't have time to dry before reaching the packaging dept. Connect your drive and thoroughly run every test that the SSD Toolbox offers. If it shows 100% drive health (or 99%, which seems to be common for new drives) then there is nothing to be worried about.

[idata]

thanks, i didnt want to return it. And it wasnt even formatted, thanks for the response.

IM a noob and im about to install this drive as a boot drive in my Evga x58 le with win 7 64bit

I read that there was procedures i should follow.

Can someone assist me because all i hear about is TRIM (i kno wat that is)

But like how do i install the drive

They say i should should only use 20 percent of the drive?

What other steps are needed?

[idata]

First off you need to get your machine into AHCI mode. Somebody here can help you with that. Make sure you align the drive first. If you don't know about it someone here can point you to the step by step. I can't remember where it is. Don't know who told you not to use more than 20% of the drive but it is not correct. If that were true they should only charge you for 16 gigs. hehe

Windows 7 WILL align the drive but uses a default alignment offset of 1024. In benchmarks I have seen they perform better with 64K offset. Sound confusing? It is. And you will probably find that all of us here had to go through this learning curve about SSD's. Fortunately we have this forum and all the great people here to help. Would be a duanting and google intensive task otherwise.