Does yours ever slow down to the point of pretty much locking up as well? Mine was doing that when I had the drive hooked to the internal bay (not with it hooked into the USB port). If I was trying to unzip a video file that was stored on the drive an operation that would normally take 5-10 seconds would take a minute just to reach the 1% complete mark.
Boot up would take forever with the system seemingly getting stuck at the Win 7 boot up animation (the flag animation).
This is a huge difference compared to how it acts when it's not doing the drive hang up thing. Boot up from a cold start would literally take around 5 seconds. It was so fast in fact that the animation never even got a chance to fully turn into a square before everything was up and running.
I'm willing to give it another shot with the replacement that Amazon is sending me.
For your sake though, I hope that Intel will back their product and do right on your part by somehow fixing a software related issue, or sending you a new non-defective unit.
I'm going to keep up with this thread to see what they're going to do as far as fixing this. And I'll be back in here if my new system does the same thing as this old one.