I don't own any of the recent OCZ drives, but all I hear is horror stories. I would imagine focusing on fixing your product rather rushing more to market would be a better strategy when your brand name is getting hurt to the point most people don't even consider OCZ an option for a reliable SSD anymore (some of the original vertex and vertex 2 drives were great).
I would imagine posting random rumours without any real info is... (you choose the ending).
In other words: 1 - there were bsods in sandforce (all brands using SF!); 2 - ocz helped fixing sandforce's problem; 3 - didn't hear about anything afterwards;
So, either I didn't hear and you know more than me, in which case not indicating any hint or fact just makes your post rather... st..id. Or there wasn't anything else, which makes it even worse!!
My experience with OCZ drives involves having a barefoot and martini drive decide to brick themselves in the firmware. The only recovery option would have been a professional service. This isn't an occasional BSOD. This is "the drive disappears from BIOS". Although I'm still using both, I'm leery about going OCZ again.
I own two OCZ drives. I've had problems with both. Not a good track record.
I'm using a 120gb version I've never had any issues. I bought mine during the BSOD "outbreak", like always you rarely hear from the people having no issues just the people that are having a hard time.
I've had the drive for 6 months and never experienced any BSOD even on old firmware that didn't have the sandforce crash fix.
Actually I agree with martyrant - all I've read on forums etc is negative reviews on both OCZ drive reliability and OCZ customer service. For a hard drive, reliability is more important than speed and I certainly wouldn't get one - OCZ fix or not, the damage is done. And no I can't be bothered to back it up with a scientific peer reviewed study - it is what it is i.e. anecdotal evidence and impressions. But they tales of users' frustrations resonated.
Why risk it when there are other vendors? Admittedly with even Intel, Crucial and Samsung having issues at one time or another, it is virtually impossible to find anyone with a clean record (OWC?) however OCZ appears worse than most.
But if the percentage is done over OCZ returned drives on OCZ total drives instead of OCZ returned drives on all drives of any brand, then it's all OK.
I read somewhere that 3% of OCZ sold drives were returned, while Crucial was at a 2% rate and Intel was at 1% rate, more or less.
I think I know which report you're referring to. There was a report that used data from 2010. Data that is 2 years old is irrelevant now. We're approaching Vertex 4 now. This time, OCZ owns the controller.
I'm just making the point that no one on any message board or forum knows the real failure rate (including myself). Just because you read that X drives failed does not necessarily correlate to Y failure rate. You don't know the size of the population.
It shows they're not doing enough to make things better, or that they can't. We don't have to know the exact failure rates (some returns might be customer fault), because when even the mechanical hard drives have half the return rates on average, and the other SSDs are much better, we can be reasonably sure that the SandForce drives have serious quality problems.
You shouldn't assume other people are ignorant till they prove it. Filiprino said "rate" and used percentages, so I don't know why you're going on about "X drives failed". As for size of population, it's a large french retailer. And the results sure seem to agree with the number of anecdotal complaints out there (a large enough number of anecdotes = data).
You may know of the report but did you actually read and understand it?
Of the fabless SSD players they are #1. When you design an SSD for an unknown system configuration, it's much harder to make every drive compatible.
Samsung and Toshiba make the SSD's for Apple, but it's a lot easier to make those drives reliable because you know exactly what the configuration is going to be.
Using my Agility 3 since 3/4 of a year now, no problems. Shout loud enough and enough people with similar experience will eventually speak up. No saying that there were no problems, but this whole OCZ bashing is geting rediculous.
It's interesting to see how many shills OCZ has begun employing on popular message boards these days. I guess it's easier and cheaper to pay for people to try to quash the facts rather than spend the money to engineer their products properly in the first place.
The fact is that OCZ's entire "3" line of SSDs (with SandForce controllers) suffered from crippling firmware issues for over six months before even a partially successful fix was finally released. Even with that, many users still suffer from BSODs. OCZ's response then, as now, was to deny the issues, or to try to push the blame elsewhere.
Call feedback like this what you will. My purpose is to make sure that people are aware of what they're getting into if they deal with OCZ. With so many better, more stable and reliable products out there at comparable prices, there is simply no reason to deal with a company like OCZ.
Yeah, because users who have been registered for years are all shills.
Also, it wasn't *just* OCZ drives that had a problem it was *every single* Sandforce-based drive regardless of brand. It was a *Sandforce* issue not an *OCZ* issue. Idiots blame OCZ and think it was their fault and that only OCZ drives were effected, then there are the rational people...
Certainly it affected all SandForce-based drives. The differences were that OCZ took over SIX MONTHS to resolve the situation, and in the meantime engaged in a pattern of obfuscation and blaming their user base for the issues. Just be honest and own up to the situation...for this customer at least, I don't ask for much more than that.
I recently built a Win 7 desktop and used an Agility 3 120 as the main drive. It came with the .17 bios revision (one users reported was stable) and the system has worked perfectly for me. Granted, I don't use it that often, but it works very well. I also have an older Vertex 2 in my MacBook, and that has also worked flawlessly now for over a year of frequent use. But obviously some people have had issues...
As others have already stated, you only ever hear from the people having troubles, rarely from those without issue.
I bought the OCZ Vertex 3 while the drives were apparently having troubles with BSODs and have been happy using it since. I have never had a drive related BSOD pre-fix or since.
I had a Vertex2 in my laptop and the drive was screaming fast! It only lasted for about two weeks before it would stutter every five minutes before the drive was no longer recognizable.
I have worked as an Electronic Technician earlier in my career and I know some stuff does fail, no big deal.
After receiving a replacement and going through the drive partitioning, duplication and alignment process - all was well, for about two weeks!
I dumped it on ebay for half of what I paid.
I don't care how fast a drive is, it has to be reliable. It seems as if they did very little audit on the product as they figured that we love OCZ so much we'd be happy to perform that duty for them with our invaluable data.
Just ordered a Crucial M4 128GB for a desktop system boot drive and think I will have terrific performance and reliability if NewEgg's forums are to be believed!
The only Sandforce 2281 controller containing SSD that is 100% stable is the intel 520 series SSD that Intel made custom firmware for that took over a year to be finished.
Much better off getting a crucial M4 256GB for 310 dollars now at tigerdirect. Plus the crucial m4 has the best 4k random read performance of all ssd's currently on the market. Random 4k read is what makes you boot up faster and load programs faster. It's really the most important spec and Crucial dominates that statistic. They are also near the top for random write performance too.
I have 2 vertex 3's in raid 0 and have had no issue with anything, other than reminding myself to make reasons to get up from my computer since i don't have the waiting time to go pee pee or smoke some rock.
I've never had a crash, bsod, or any other issue related to the drives. some people are really stupid and brick their drives all the time. they put them into sleep mode, they unplug and plug them back in on different boards, and so on. Stupid people = stupid results.
I did have a bad VERTEX LIMITED awhile back and they next day aired me a replacement from the other side of the planet. It literally took 16 hours to get here from Taiwan. I'd like to see the shipping check on that one. If it breaks, they fix it, stop your bitching. Just buy an intel, oh wait, it's out of your budget range. . .
Helped a friend of mine spec out a system just before the Vertex Series 3 hit. He got a good price on a Vertex 2. Lastest bios, etc.
It lasted a couple of months before the first BSOD. Continued updates for Bios (and Motherboard, etc) and still had the problem. Several drive replacements later and multiple (Can't see it even in BIOS issues) and he got fed up and replaced it with the latest Intel SSD drive. Company he bought the drive from told him the same thing he found out the hard way. Massive problems with SSD's. He's using all top end components, Intel, Asus, etc. Nothing overclocked.
He had so many BSOD's that he made an image and was back up in running in record times. Thank god I had him spec out a standard 2TB enterprise level drive for all the games/data. Just the core system on the OCZ 240GB Vertex 2.
I just wanted to debunk the bad stories I have read about these SSD's. I have three of them one has been in use for about a year and the second and third ones for just over 6 months. All three have performed flawlessly since day one. The first one (60Gb) is in a Toshiba Qosmio 18.4 inch i7 Gaming Laptop as an OS drive and the others (360 GB) as an OS/APP drive, and a (120 GB) Photoshop scratch drive are in an AMD XF i7 graphics workstation. All three of these drives have been outstanding from the time they were installed. Though SSD's are not generally recommended as scratch drives I just did this one as an experiment. So far it has performed well and I can't see any reason not to use them for this application. However it has only been in use for just over six months now. After about a year or so I will have a better idea of how good it is for this kind of use so far nothing to complain about.
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martyrant - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 - link
I don't own any of the recent OCZ drives, but all I hear is horror stories. I would imagine focusing on fixing your product rather rushing more to market would be a better strategy when your brand name is getting hurt to the point most people don't even consider OCZ an option for a reliable SSD anymore (some of the original vertex and vertex 2 drives were great).Jaegs - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 - link
I've had 4 of these drives in RAID-0 as my boot drive on my gaming pc for about a year now with not a single issue or crash related to them.There now you've heard *almost* all horror stories about them.
Qapa - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 - link
I would imagine posting random rumours without any real info is... (you choose the ending).In other words:
1 - there were bsods in sandforce (all brands using SF!);
2 - ocz helped fixing sandforce's problem;
3 - didn't hear about anything afterwards;
So, either I didn't hear and you know more than me, in which case not indicating any hint or fact just makes your post rather... st..id. Or there wasn't anything else, which makes it even worse!!
Demon-Xanth - Monday, March 5, 2012 - link
My experience with OCZ drives involves having a barefoot and martini drive decide to brick themselves in the firmware. The only recovery option would have been a professional service. This isn't an occasional BSOD. This is "the drive disappears from BIOS". Although I'm still using both, I'm leery about going OCZ again.I own two OCZ drives. I've had problems with both. Not a good track record.
Proxy711 - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 - link
I'm using a 120gb version I've never had any issues. I bought mine during the BSOD "outbreak", like always you rarely hear from the people having no issues just the people that are having a hard time.I've had the drive for 6 months and never experienced any BSOD even on old firmware that didn't have the sandforce crash fix.
JNo - Thursday, March 1, 2012 - link
Actually I agree with martyrant - all I've read on forums etc is negative reviews on both OCZ drive reliability and OCZ customer service. For a hard drive, reliability is more important than speed and I certainly wouldn't get one - OCZ fix or not, the damage is done. And no I can't be bothered to back it up with a scientific peer reviewed study - it is what it is i.e. anecdotal evidence and impressions. But they tales of users' frustrations resonated.Why risk it when there are other vendors? Admittedly with even Intel, Crucial and Samsung having issues at one time or another, it is virtually impossible to find anyone with a clean record (OWC?) however OCZ appears worse than most.
josephjpeters - Thursday, March 1, 2012 - link
"OCZ appears worse than most."Only because they sell significantly more SSD's than most. You need to keep that in perspective.
Failure rate is a percentage. Can't compute a percentage without accounting for sales volume.
Filiprino - Thursday, March 1, 2012 - link
But if the percentage is done over OCZ returned drives on OCZ total drives instead of OCZ returned drives on all drives of any brand, then it's all OK.I read somewhere that 3% of OCZ sold drives were returned, while Crucial was at a 2% rate and Intel was at 1% rate, more or less.
josephjpeters - Thursday, March 1, 2012 - link
I think I know which report you're referring to. There was a report that used data from 2010. Data that is 2 years old is irrelevant now. We're approaching Vertex 4 now. This time, OCZ owns the controller.I'm just making the point that no one on any message board or forum knows the real failure rate (including myself). Just because you read that X drives failed does not necessarily correlate to Y failure rate. You don't know the size of the population.
lyeoh - Sunday, March 4, 2012 - link
2010 data is not irrelevant when even more 2011 data shows high (or even higher) return rates:http://www.behardware.com/articles/843-7/component...
It shows they're not doing enough to make things better, or that they can't. We don't have to know the exact failure rates (some returns might be customer fault), because when even the mechanical hard drives have half the return rates on average, and the other SSDs are much better, we can be reasonably sure that the SandForce drives have serious quality problems.
You shouldn't assume other people are ignorant till they prove it. Filiprino said "rate" and used percentages, so I don't know why you're going on about "X drives failed". As for size of population, it's a large french retailer. And the results sure seem to agree with the number of anecdotal complaints out there (a large enough number of anecdotes = data).
You may know of the report but did you actually read and understand it?
menting - Friday, March 2, 2012 - link
OCZ doesn't sell significantly more SSDs than most.They are ranked #5.
First is Samsung, forgot #2 and #3, 4th is Micron, and 5th is OCZ.
josephjpeters - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
Of the fabless SSD players they are #1. When you design an SSD for an unknown system configuration, it's much harder to make every drive compatible.Samsung and Toshiba make the SSD's for Apple, but it's a lot easier to make those drives reliable because you know exactly what the configuration is going to be.
MrSpadge - Thursday, March 1, 2012 - link
Using my Agility 3 since 3/4 of a year now, no problems. Shout loud enough and enough people with similar experience will eventually speak up. No saying that there were no problems, but this whole OCZ bashing is geting rediculous.LB-ID - Thursday, March 1, 2012 - link
It's interesting to see how many shills OCZ has begun employing on popular message boards these days. I guess it's easier and cheaper to pay for people to try to quash the facts rather than spend the money to engineer their products properly in the first place.The fact is that OCZ's entire "3" line of SSDs (with SandForce controllers) suffered from crippling firmware issues for over six months before even a partially successful fix was finally released. Even with that, many users still suffer from BSODs. OCZ's response then, as now, was to deny the issues, or to try to push the blame elsewhere.
Call feedback like this what you will. My purpose is to make sure that people are aware of what they're getting into if they deal with OCZ. With so many better, more stable and reliable products out there at comparable prices, there is simply no reason to deal with a company like OCZ.
MadMan007 - Friday, March 2, 2012 - link
Yeah, because users who have been registered for years are all shills.Also, it wasn't *just* OCZ drives that had a problem it was *every single* Sandforce-based drive regardless of brand. It was a *Sandforce* issue not an *OCZ* issue. Idiots blame OCZ and think it was their fault and that only OCZ drives were effected, then there are the rational people...
LB-ID - Friday, March 2, 2012 - link
Certainly it affected all SandForce-based drives. The differences were that OCZ took over SIX MONTHS to resolve the situation, and in the meantime engaged in a pattern of obfuscation and blaming their user base for the issues. Just be honest and own up to the situation...for this customer at least, I don't ask for much more than that.androticus - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 - link
I recently built a Win 7 desktop and used an Agility 3 120 as the main drive. It came with the .17 bios revision (one users reported was stable) and the system has worked perfectly for me. Granted, I don't use it that often, but it works very well. I also have an older Vertex 2 in my MacBook, and that has also worked flawlessly now for over a year of frequent use. But obviously some people have had issues...jimbo2779 - Thursday, March 1, 2012 - link
As others have already stated, you only ever hear from the people having troubles, rarely from those without issue.I bought the OCZ Vertex 3 while the drives were apparently having troubles with BSODs and have been happy using it since. I have never had a drive related BSOD pre-fix or since.
josephjpeters - Thursday, March 1, 2012 - link
10 months with my Vertex 3, no problems.OCZ sells 130k+ SSD's every month. Keep that in mind.
RaistlinZ - Thursday, March 1, 2012 - link
I'm still happily chugging along with my 120GB Vertex 2,estarkey7 - Friday, March 2, 2012 - link
I had a Vertex2 in my laptop and the drive was screaming fast! It only lasted for about two weeks before it would stutter every five minutes before the drive was no longer recognizable.I have worked as an Electronic Technician earlier in my career and I know some stuff does fail, no big deal.
After receiving a replacement and going through the drive partitioning, duplication and alignment process - all was well, for about two weeks!
I dumped it on ebay for half of what I paid.
I don't care how fast a drive is, it has to be reliable. It seems as if they did very little audit on the product as they figured that we love OCZ so much we'd be happy to perform that duty for them with our invaluable data.
Just ordered a Crucial M4 128GB for a desktop system boot drive and think I will have terrific performance and reliability if NewEgg's forums are to be believed!
Laststop311 - Saturday, March 3, 2012 - link
The only Sandforce 2281 controller containing SSD that is 100% stable is the intel 520 series SSD that Intel made custom firmware for that took over a year to be finished.Much better off getting a crucial M4 256GB for 310 dollars now at tigerdirect. Plus the crucial m4 has the best 4k random read performance of all ssd's currently on the market. Random 4k read is what makes you boot up faster and load programs faster. It's really the most important spec and Crucial dominates that statistic. They are also near the top for random write performance too.
Owls - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
Is extra.* BSODs and other issues are included free of charge*Must purchase a Samsung or Intel 320 drive
Crazyeyeskillah - Monday, March 12, 2012 - link
I have 2 vertex 3's in raid 0 and have had no issue with anything, other than reminding myself to make reasons to get up from my computer since i don't have the waiting time to go pee pee or smoke some rock.I've never had a crash, bsod, or any other issue related to the drives. some people are really stupid and brick their drives all the time. they put them into sleep mode, they unplug and plug them back in on different boards, and so on. Stupid people = stupid results.
I did have a bad VERTEX LIMITED awhile back and they next day aired me a replacement from the other side of the planet. It literally took 16 hours to get here from Taiwan. I'd like to see the shipping check on that one. If it breaks, they fix it, stop your bitching. Just buy an intel, oh wait, it's out of your budget range. . .
AnandReader1999 - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
Helped a friend of mine spec out a system just before the Vertex Series 3 hit. He got a good price on a Vertex 2. Lastest bios, etc.It lasted a couple of months before the first BSOD. Continued updates for Bios (and Motherboard, etc) and still had the problem. Several drive replacements later and multiple (Can't see it even in BIOS issues) and he got fed up and replaced it with the latest Intel SSD drive. Company he bought the drive from told him the same thing he found out the hard way. Massive problems with SSD's. He's using all top end components, Intel, Asus, etc. Nothing overclocked.
He had so many BSOD's that he made an image and was back up in running in record times. Thank god I had him spec out a standard 2TB enterprise level drive for all the games/data. Just the core system on the OCZ 240GB Vertex 2.
darrellj48 - Thursday, June 21, 2012 - link
I just wanted to debunk the bad stories I have read about these SSD's. I have three of them one has been in use for about a year and the second and third ones for just over 6 months. All three have performed flawlessly since day one. The first one (60Gb) is in a Toshiba Qosmio 18.4 inch i7 Gaming Laptop as an OS drive and the others (360 GB) as an OS/APP drive, and a (120 GB) Photoshop scratch drive are in an AMD XF i7 graphics workstation. All three of these drives have been outstanding from the time they were installed. Though SSD's are not generally recommended as scratch drives I just did this one as an experiment. So far it has performed well and I can't see any reason not to use them for this application. However it has only been in use for just over six months now. After about a year or so I will have a better idea of how good it is for this kind of use so far nothing to complain about.