80gig m-sata SSD intel toolbox errors

[idata]

Has anyone experienced errors reported by the intel toolbox with windows 7 and repaired it successfully/reliably with a simple windows reformat?

I had windows booting from 310 series 80Gb intel m-sata SSD, all was fine for 6 months, then I had an unexpected freeze while hibernating. (something that left the CPU running flatout and the drive light on), and required a hard reset. at the time I though it was a one off, and may still be unrelated

Shortly after I noticed windows backups failing, the problem stemmed from windows not being able to make shadow copies during the backup process, "IO error on drive C". Trying a copy of all files on the SSD (just to try things out) resulted in several files that could not be read due to device errors, not the usual widows file locking etc, but proper IO device errors)

that lead me to the intel SSD toolbox, a full test of the drive reported "Error: An error was detected reading data from the selected intel SSD Contact your re-seller or local Intel representative for assistance". This always occurred at 60% through the full test and did so repeatedly.

After opening a ticket the solution/test suggested was to do a secure erase in the intel toolbox of the drive (not possible unless the drive is externally connected via an adaptor to an e-sata port). Clearly this was not a convenient option; being my boot disk that I could not make a backup of successfully (I've ended up with a nice new 240 GB sata drive to replace my spinning disk) after migrating everything off the suspect SSD and formatting it in windows disk management (long format) it seems the error has gone, it repeatedly passes the test in the intel toolbox.

Before I 'fixed' the drive, intel had suggested RMA, I was wondering if anyone had any experience of this type of issue and how they fixed it (clearly a reformat of a system disk is not a convenient fix if these errors come back, but I expect i'll just be using this disk for files from now on since i'm happily booting from the new disk) Other than this one issue the drive seemed completely reliable, and at the moment I can't find anything wrong with it - I'm now at pains to remove it and RMA it when I can no longer find fault with it.

After the format the drive reports as being exactly the same number of blocks as before - unless ive missed something then nothing on the drive has been marked as bad/mapped out as unusable

Computer: Lenovo X220, windows 7 updated with all latest windows updates, SSD has latest firmware and did so at time of fault