Precision M6500 and SSD Drives - 3 broken drives later...

So, I have a Dell Precision M6500 which has worked absolutely brilliantly for 2 years with Windows 7 64, and I am almost certain in that time it didn't crash a single time. It came with a 320GB HDD, which I recently decided I could complement with an SSD drive, since I was starting to think of reinstalling Windows anyway.

So, I bought a Corsair 120GB Force 3 SSD drive and put that into the drive 1 bay, replacing the original drive, and moving that one to the second bay. I installed Windows 7 64 on the new drive, installed the service pack, installed all the drivers and even got as far as installing all my programs. So far so good!

So, 2 days later, I press the power button on my laptop, and I get an error message just after the Dell logo that says "no drive can be found" or something along those lines. Initial reaction is as always denial, so I tried restarting... same thing. I took the drive out and booted back off from my old drive which thankfully I hadn't wiped yet. Connected the drive via a Serial-2-USB converter to make sure the drive couldn't be accessed. It certainly couldn't. Dead.

So, I put this down to bad luck and return the drive, the replacement arrives and I go through the installation process again. Everything seems fine again and I get as far as installing everything and even getting some work done. However, a few days later, I try to resume the laptop from sleep, and it crashes. On restart, I get the same message. Drive dead again.

So, I think to myself, maybe it's the Corsair Force 3? Maybe the drive isn't reliable and I return it, get my money back and promptly order a new ADATA 120GB S510 SSD drive instead. It arrives, and I again go through the process of installing Win7, drivers, software, program settings etc. Not without a hitch this time however as throughout this process (which takes me a couple of days) the laptop starts blue screening on me. Eventually I notice a pattern - shortly after coming out of sleep mode it would be really slow, hang for a bit and then blue screen. 

So, following a little head scratching I decide to turn off power saving entirely, removing sleep and hibernate options from the power plans, and the blue screening stops. By this point I've used the laptop with this drive for a month and I am enjoying how quick it is though I am a little sad I seem to have to sacrifice power saving to keep the drive. That decision however was taken out of my hands yesterday, as after working like a charm for the whole day, upon restarting it for a stupid Apple iTunes update, the same error message came up. Again, drive dead, and I am back to using my trusty old spin-disc drive. 

So, not doing that again.

I don't know is it's me, the machine, the serial bus controller, the drives or a combination of two or more of the above, but thought I'd let everybody know about the experience. I don't suppose anybody has had anything similar? If so, it would be great to hear about it.

Just as a side-note, after the first HDD broke, I wondered if it was to do with heat so I monitored the heat sensors in the machine throughout the life of the second and third ill-fated drives and although the processor would often go up to 89-90C degrees, the hard drives seldom went above 40, which is well within operational guidelines.

Thanks for reading - it's a long one, I know.