Is my SSD dead? (help!)

I'm hoping someone can help me with this.

First a little background, I have an Intel 510 SSD 120gb. I did the DIY install into my 2011 27" imac. I did a clean install of Lion on 7/23. Since then I have had the drive give me trouble upon start up 3 times. I get a gray bar at the bottom of the white boot up screen that only fills maybe 20% of the bar before shutting the machine down automatically. That's 3 times in 3 weeks!

Lucky for me I kept my 1tb HDD with Snow Leopard in the machine. I am able to boot up in SL and try to verify/repair the SSD with disc utility but am not successful at verify or repair. Screenshots:




At this point I have been able to erase the disc and reinstall Lion. I have done this twice now but today my problem was a little different. Again no boot up into Lion. Ran disc utility and got this:



I don't know if this is a hardware problem or is it something caused by software....? None of the instances were able to be repaired by disc utility, an erase and new OS install were required.

I'm afraid my SSD is toast! Is there any other troubleshooting I should do before sending it to Intel? I'm really hoping I don't have to send it in for warranty.....

 

Thanks but this is a third party SSD from Intel, not covered by Apple Care.....

 

Yeah, the only problem I'm having is with the SSD. I can boot snow leopard from my oem HDD and everything else with the imac is A-OK. I still don't see any reason to visit a genius bar. Will they even help me with 3rd party hardware....?

I was thinking of making a partition for lion on me oem HDD and seeing what happens. I guess the SSD must come out. The only reason I hesitate is because if I erase the SSD and verify the disc everything seems OK.... That's why I was kind of hoping the issue was being caused by something else. It doesn't seem like a total failure of the drive, unless this is an anomaly of disc utility with SSDs.....?

 

After spending some time researching on google, this is the conclusion i have come to. I'm really hoping it's a firmware or controller issue, i guess that's better than a complete drive failure. Perhaps a FW update will fix the problem in the not so distant future. I wish I would have learned all this before getting the Intel, oh well OWC just a phone call away I guess....

Thanks for all the info folks!

 

Thanks for the feedback. Just curious which SSDs are you using and at what interface are they wired? (sata 2, data 3, etc) The more I look into the issue the more I think it's related to Intel's controller not playing nice with 's sata 3 interface.... I'm hoping the 10.7.1 update will help, i guess we will see....