this thread is somewhat rediculous and its frustrating to see a great product and company getting some undeserved bashing
Boogie,
if you have not yet subscribed to the sounddevices support website, you should. I am not the only person seeing these issues. There are other people with the stock drive having this problem and I was not the first person to report it. You may also note announcements in which the SD has indicated that they think they have fixed the media speed problem with friday's firmware release. So clearly they acknowlege that there is an issue in their code.
You need to reread the threads. Yes people are running chkdsk against the drives. In my own case I had the media speed error four times on a drive that was reformatted and clean and written with contiguous sessions. There was 0% fragmentation according to the analysis tool.
So as for undeserved bashing, I don't see that. They shipped a device that has a very simple functionality. It should work with fewer severe issues than it does. The user should not have to do a magic dance before each show to ensure that the filesystem drivers don't fail during the session.
Edit: I'm happy for you that you've seen no problems. My unit, after they repaired the firewire port, worked like a champ up until the latest firmware install.