i have the same problem with a write amplification of about 8...
290 GB Host Writes, 2376 GB NAND Writes after two months of usage as system drive in a perfectly optimized win 7 pc (no page file, no prefetching, correct alignment, ...).
a 330 series drive in another pc shows a write amplification of about 1, win 7 system drive as well...
but this is not the only problem, the 530 has an extremely high response time of about 160ms as reported in another thread here by two other users already. this response time seems related to the sleep modes of the drive, if i use ioping to create a read request every second and prevent the drive from entering deep sleep the max. response time is down to about 5ms, with a read request every 50ms the response time is at flat 0 as i would expect from a ssd.
the x25m g2 i replaced with the 530 never had this kind of response times, it just performed properly just as the 330 in the other pc does...
i tried all kinds of different drivers already and disabled all power management features on the host pc with no effect, so i'm afraid this behavior is even intended by design.
could some other users of the 530 please check the response times they get to figure out if there are any 530s working properly? the windows integrated performance monitor is all you need (avg disk sec/read and avg disk sec/write counters), even the resource monitor (task manager->performance->resource monitor->disk) shows the high response times.
my request to intel: please release an i400 (520 series) like firmware for the 530 disabling the new sleep states of the sf2281 b02 controller, label it optional or beta if you want but the 530 is unusable this way.
