I changed the topic name to more accurately describe my problem.
I received Samsung 830s back from RMA, which was pleasantly fast. The rep I talked to sent me a prepaid UPS label that was for overnight delivery. The package I received back was also aired to me. It took in total all of four days (not counting the weekend). I was pretty impressed.
However, I'm starting to learn things about the 830s that isn't too impressive. Apparently the 830s and 840s have issues with CRC errors, which is quite common, apparently so common that it's a part of normal every day use, you just don't normally notice them. Maybe occasionally you'll get a BSoD, but the actual system wide implications aren't that noticeable. The problem with this is I do Acronis image back ups of my 3xr0 array and this puts extended stress on the array, which eventually throws a CRC error and the entire array shuts down... Of course this results in a BSoD. I've found that if I turn 'ignore bad sectors' on, I no longer get BSoDs though. However, this does make me wonder how reliable that data is in that backup if it's throwing a CRC error and Acronis just ignores it. Doing a chkdsk /r also results in a BSoD at random points. Also running the normal 'benchmark' in HD Tune occasionally results in a BSoD.
I originally did not run into these issues on my Intel system with a very similar motherboard, the P8Z77-V LK. However, since I had three disks I ran all three disks on the SATA 2 ports instead of two on the SATA 3 and one on the SATA 2 in order to maintain uniformity. Thus the drives always ran at a slower speed and never up to their potential.
It seems as though these errors do not actually corrupt the data and one of the reasons I'm running into BSoDs is because they are in a raid array. This of course definitely increases my likeliness of corruption due to the array dropping out in the middle of a write (which has started to happen). Furthermore according to the smart data for my old drives I never got reallocated sectors or hardware ECC errors, only CRC Errors. This makes it seem as though Samsung has some issues with their SATA implementation.
I've been reading in general that 830 and 840 drives are very fincky. Some people stating that the cable makes a world of difference (I tried three different cables and this doesn't make any difference), some state that it depends on the motherboard, others that it depends on AMD or Intel. There may be a bit of legitimacy to that last part as Intel may be a lot better at handling data inconsistencies. I've tried four different boards, P8Z77-V LK, M5A99FX Pro R2.0, M5A99X Evo R2.0, and a old AMD system with SATA 1 ports on it. The old AMD system didn't run into any errors and neither did the Intel system. Since this was so sporadic I had thought that this may be caused by my motherboard and I returned it for a slightly different model, thinking it would make a difference, but it didn't.
I've done all the basic troubleshooting steps so I'm pretty darn sure it's not my system and even the refurbished drives I was sent exhibit these same issues. They apparently don't reset the smart data on the drives and one of the ones I received back had a whopping 140,782 CRC errors on it.
Looking around the web these CRC errors don't seem uncommon at all. There is one really big SSD reliability thread on xtremsystems, I haven't gotten a chance to look through it, but there are quite a few posts of 830s with CRC errors in them.
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/sho ... nm-Vs-34nmOn a related note, one of the topics they mention as some of the thread participants are actually writing the disks till they fail is none of the disks they've stressed have fallen into a 'read only state'.