Introduction

We've had the Monster Digital Daytona 240GB for a very long time. The sample arrived around a month before the launch and shipped with one of the early 5-Series firmware versions known to have issues with TRIM. Since updated firmware should of only been an email away, we gave Monster the same courtesy we gave Corsair, Kingston, and a number of other manufacturers - time to spin the firmware with their SSD ID (so it installs and we can use it on the drive).

We explained the SF TRIM issue back in August of 2012 and were told by Monster's outside marketing agent that firmware would arrive in a couple of days. The firmware never arrived so we followed up, but stopped getting replies. Eventually we sent an email to Monster's customer support email address and received a reply right away; they were working on the firmware and would have it published on their website support area in the near future. By that time, Daytona was listed for sale on Amazon and a few other e-tail outlets. Another couple of months passed and TRIM enabled firmware was still MIA.

A few days ago, we stumbled across firmware for the Monster Digital Daytona, on a review site forum and published by an end-user. Monster Digital still doesn't have an official post on their site for working firmware, but they did acknowledge another issue with Daytona.

As you can see, Monster has a bit of an issue with their Daytona 120GB. They shifted the blame on "a single production lot [of] Intel NAND." The Product Alert doesn't go into a lot of details, but the reviews at Amazon make it very clear that Monster Daytona 120GB drives have an issue with corrupting data. One review states, "You'll be LUCKY if it is DOA!" This is where I would like to get off track a bit and speak off the cuff. This is a data storage product and it has a primary purpose, to store data. Instead of shifting the blame to a bad batch of NAND, just step up and say you don't test products before shipping them to e-tailers. SSDs aren't new technology anymore and testing procedures are pretty standard. The notice on Monster's website should just say, 'We are a bunch of *ssholes who put your data at risk because we wanted to jump on the SSD bandwagon, but don't know sh*t about SSDs.'

Not only that, if Monster Digital is now using Intel NAND on Daytona then they changed the BOM (build of materials) without notifying customers. Our early sample shipped with 32nm Toshiba NAND. To my knowledge this is the first time we've ran across 32nm Toshiba Toggle used in conjunction with a LSI SandForce SF-2281 controller. Sometimes throw back NAND is good for an SSD since you increase endurance, but in this case, well... not so much. We'll explain later in the review.