How long does it take to do a mail in rebate? Sounds like a pain and they don't always pay. Another column containing price without rebate would be appreciated.
Also, word on the street is that Intel 520 SSDs are delayed until Q1 2012.
I just got mine approved after two weeks. Now it's going to be another few weeks until I see the debit card. They're doing this on a large scale so you can expect them to drag everything out as far as possible for financial reasons.
I have received my only MIR from OCZ that I had to send in after 3 months of wait. I know many people have complained OCZ MIR are not reliable. Just like almost any other MIRs.
There's a reason that they're on sale...all of the Sandforce-based 3-series SSDs from OCZ have been plagued by crippling bugs and firmware issues. BSOD and random disconnects are the rule of the day, and even after six months, their latest fix is only moderately better. Their support forums are absolutely aflame with users having no end of issues.
Grab one if you're feeling lucky, but know going in that you're really rolling the dice.
Yeah, I'd been wanting one of these for a while for home, and then my company got me one for my work machine a couple weeks ago after the Intel G2 that was in there died. Flashed the latest 2.15 firmware before we did anything else, and then loaded a fresh copy of Win7. It was awesome for about a week, and then I'd start getting 1-2 minute lockups where the system would hang while waiting for the drive to respond to a request. Tried a number of things and nothing fixed it, so I'm back on a mechanical drive now while I wait for a more reliable SSD to arrive. THAT'S a rude awakening -- if you ever need a quick reminder on why we love SSD's, try returning to a mechanical drive for a few days.
But either way, yeah, these clearly work for some people, but after experiencing the problems firsthand, I'm just not willing to risk it.
It seems that they are stable with the new FW. At least I don't see any problem - that's under Linux though. But they're stuck with the bad reputation so they'll probably want to get it over with. I hope they learned their lesson about qualifying. We're qualifying another SSD product at work and see endless problems and FW du jour.
Discounting junk isn't that great of a deal. With all the issues that have been going on with these drives they should be selling them at 50% off or more.
Those who have no problems with the current SSDs think they are great. Those who suffer data loss, BSOD and end up RMA'ing the drive(s) think they are a royal PITA. Until these SSDs are trouble-free they ain't for me.
I have a Vertex1 120GB, and four 3 Vertex2's. (1x120GB, 1x180GB and 1x240GB) and NONE of them have ever given me any problems (I didn't cause myself).
It once looked like I killed my Vertex1, but it turned out I filled it till 0 bytes free and that firmware didn't handle it too well. Hooked up to another computer (or boot Live-CD) and remove some stuff, viola, problem solved. They fixed that later on so that it wouldn't become that much of an issue anymore.
But up until now, all SandForce based products I have (and people I have recommended them to) have worked very well.
I have read a lot about the problems with the SandForce 6Gbps (2nd gen) controllers, and it sucks if you do have the combination that troubled by that. But either give them time, or don't be on the bleeding edge. And sure, I agree you buy a product, it HAS to work, but sometimes, they just don't right out of the box. I don't agree with the practice, but currently, that's how companies operate, flush the product out and we'll fix it in a patch. Sad, but true. Anyone remember the SSD controllers that came before the Indilinx and Sandforce controllers? Now THOSE where horrible! SandForce is doing the best job they can, in a rough market while being a relatively new company. And even Intel has shown it's share of problems over the last 2 years with their SSD's, so there has been NO brand which has not delivered a new chipset of firmware without problems. It's a pioneering field....
OCZ, well I can only really blame them for going to 25nm flash without a different product number... that was just dumb. Especially because they halved the flash channels on the 60GB model. But even that is behind us, and they learned.
So yeah, I can understand frustration, but don't bash OCZ or Sandforce like they are the most horrible company there is. They actually have a pretty good track record. And I have especially enjoyed their openness and how closely they have worked with anandtech. So cut them a little bit of slack.
Raid is only good if you need the uptime. I say go with rolling updates and keep it unplugged unless updating or restoring.
On the other hand if you backup up something that takes to much data to have a 1:1 backup, I love flexraid's Snapshot raid. Just create an array with the data drives and create parity on a spare disk ( or multiple spare disks, depending on how many drive failures you want to be protected against). Unlike Raid 5 if the array cannot be rebuild, the drives that still have data remain unaffected.
Snapshot raid is only good for data that doesn't get modified often since you have to run the snapshot raid to update the parity, adding new files doesn't matter, nor do name changes.
Don't have a problem with sandforce still a fairly new company so they are learning as for OCZ don't trust them and more so after they pull that bait and switch last year with there SSDs.
And its great Quindor that you haven't ran into any issue but I still would never recommend OCZ/Sandforce SSD for anyone that isn't a computer tech.
And even for those that know what they are doing i would advise against it.
There are a few components that reliability matters more than speed and the biggest two for me are memory and storage!
Reliability only matters more than speed with regards to storage if you're storing important, irreplaceable data on the storage medium. If you're putting that sort of data on an SSD, as a consumer, you're doing it wrong. That sort of data is fine on a large, mechanical drive since it probably isn't speed sensitive and it should be backed up somewhere anyway.
SSD, for now, is for OS, swap drive, and performance sensitive applications. In the unlikely event your drive does die, all you've lost is the OS and applications which can be easily reinstalled... and if you're that worried about it, you should have an image of the drive backed up which you can quickly copy to a replacement drive.
Disks fail, SSD's fail. For some reason a lot of people are convinced that SSD's are the holy grail and will never fail like mechanical disks did.... but they fail sometimes, just as mechanical drives do, just in a different way.
Go RAID-1, make backups. Like your used to doing and you'll have no problems with your data.
Crashing, BSOD's and such still sucks though. From what I read, the newest firmwares fixes this for most if not all people, but still that is hard to deal with.
Further I don't understand why everyone is bashing OCZ... all current SandForce products suffer the same problem? From what I can see, OCZ support has been excellent in replacement drives, etc.
As somebody from the UK, we do not have MIR and I really cannot understand the point of them either. From the outside, they seem to create work for everybody involved which ultimately achieves the same result as an additional discount to the product before sale. Am I missing something?
The sales we have here are are always "x percentage off".
I envy you. MIRs are a ripoff. They are just a way to sucker someone in knowing damn well that most of the rebates do not get sent back. It is a marketing ploy plain and simple. They should be outlawed IMO.
Darn the luck. I ordered 3 OCZ Agility 3 120GB drives last week.
I completed my first build with one of the Agility 3's yesterday and have had zero problems so far. The speed of these drives rock.
I also own a 3.5" Vertex II 60 GB, two Agility 60GBs and an original Vertex 60GB. I have never had a problem with any of these drives (fingers crossed with the other 2 Agility 3's.) I'll stick with OCZ until they make me a believer in all this negativity in the comments I've been reading. So far, I'm as happy as can be and the performance is top notch.
My only tip with the Agility 3 is to make sure you set the controller to AHCI in the BIOS right from the get go. Then once you have everything loaded, run WEI so Win7 turns on the SSD settings. I dunno, maybe I'm just lucky with the drives. /shrug
I wish I was lucky with the timing on the purchase lol
All hard drives prices have gone up on Newegg.com and a few other sites I've been checking. This 15% off is likely still more expensive than the drive was a month ago.
OCZ 120GB Vertex Plus was $119, now it is $144. Seagate Hybrid 500GB was $99, now is $159.
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josephjpeters - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
I bet this is to clear the inventory for Octane. Can't wait to get one of those.mckirkus - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
How long does it take to do a mail in rebate? Sounds like a pain and they don't always pay. Another column containing price without rebate would be appreciated.Also, word on the street is that Intel 520 SSDs are delayed until Q1 2012.
Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
Updated. The prices also changed a bit, the MIR is applied after the 15% discount, not the other way :-) No big changes thoughrrohbeck - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
I just got mine approved after two weeks. Now it's going to be another few weeks until I see the debit card.They're doing this on a large scale so you can expect them to drag everything out as far as possible for financial reasons.
XZerg - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
I have received my only MIR from OCZ that I had to send in after 3 months of wait. I know many people have complained OCZ MIR are not reliable. Just like almost any other MIRs.orionismud - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
I have received all of the 5 or so OCZ rebates I have applied for. It does take a while though.LB-ID - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
There's a reason that they're on sale...all of the Sandforce-based 3-series SSDs from OCZ have been plagued by crippling bugs and firmware issues. BSOD and random disconnects are the rule of the day, and even after six months, their latest fix is only moderately better. Their support forums are absolutely aflame with users having no end of issues.Grab one if you're feeling lucky, but know going in that you're really rolling the dice.
FATCamaro - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
You got it all wrong. BSODs are free with each new customer!! Unlimited supply of BSODs!!Cisephys - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
Yeah, I'd been wanting one of these for a while for home, and then my company got me one for my work machine a couple weeks ago after the Intel G2 that was in there died. Flashed the latest 2.15 firmware before we did anything else, and then loaded a fresh copy of Win7. It was awesome for about a week, and then I'd start getting 1-2 minute lockups where the system would hang while waiting for the drive to respond to a request. Tried a number of things and nothing fixed it, so I'm back on a mechanical drive now while I wait for a more reliable SSD to arrive. THAT'S a rude awakening -- if you ever need a quick reminder on why we love SSD's, try returning to a mechanical drive for a few days.But either way, yeah, these clearly work for some people, but after experiencing the problems firsthand, I'm just not willing to risk it.
rrohbeck - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
It seems that they are stable with the new FW. At least I don't see any problem - that's under Linux though.But they're stuck with the bad reputation so they'll probably want to get it over with.
I hope they learned their lesson about qualifying. We're qualifying another SSD product at work and see endless problems and FW du jour.
Ahnilated - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
Discounting junk isn't that great of a deal. With all the issues that have been going on with these drives they should be selling them at 50% off or more.gevorg - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
I won't use OCZ drives even for free, until they show at least one solid year of good track record with their SSDs.mygocarp - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
Wow, those prices sure have dropped fast!I got mine early on and paid over $300 for it.
Beenthere - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
Those who have no problems with the current SSDs think they are great. Those who suffer data loss, BSOD and end up RMA'ing the drive(s) think they are a royal PITA. Until these SSDs are trouble-free they ain't for me.SlyNine - Thursday, November 17, 2011 - link
The only kind of whinning i would accept is from BSOD's or system hangs, lossing data is your own dam fault. BACK UP YOUR DATA!!!!. No Excuse.Makaveli - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
Do Not want!!!!For the reasons stated above.
I wouldn't even put one of there ssd's in a machine for someone I don't like.
Beenthere - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
You just want all those SSDs for yourself... :)Makaveli - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
lol maybe they should sell them to china it will BSOD on them when they are trying to hack us military systems.Quindor - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
Come on.... it's not all bad.I have a Vertex1 120GB, and four 3 Vertex2's. (1x120GB, 1x180GB and 1x240GB) and NONE of them have ever given me any problems (I didn't cause myself).
It once looked like I killed my Vertex1, but it turned out I filled it till 0 bytes free and that firmware didn't handle it too well. Hooked up to another computer (or boot Live-CD) and remove some stuff, viola, problem solved. They fixed that later on so that it wouldn't become that much of an issue anymore.
But up until now, all SandForce based products I have (and people I have recommended them to) have worked very well.
I have read a lot about the problems with the SandForce 6Gbps (2nd gen) controllers, and it sucks if you do have the combination that troubled by that. But either give them time, or don't be on the bleeding edge. And sure, I agree you buy a product, it HAS to work, but sometimes, they just don't right out of the box. I don't agree with the practice, but currently, that's how companies operate, flush the product out and we'll fix it in a patch. Sad, but true. Anyone remember the SSD controllers that came before the Indilinx and Sandforce controllers? Now THOSE where horrible! SandForce is doing the best job they can, in a rough market while being a relatively new company. And even Intel has shown it's share of problems over the last 2 years with their SSD's, so there has been NO brand which has not delivered a new chipset of firmware without problems. It's a pioneering field....
OCZ, well I can only really blame them for going to 25nm flash without a different product number... that was just dumb. Especially because they halved the flash channels on the 60GB model. But even that is behind us, and they learned.
So yeah, I can understand frustration, but don't bash OCZ or Sandforce like they are the most horrible company there is. They actually have a pretty good track record. And I have especially enjoyed their openness and how closely they have worked with anandtech. So cut them a little bit of slack.
Quindor - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
Besides... if you want to play it safe, build a RAID 1. Like there haven't been some absolutely horrible HDD products in the past. IBM Deathstar much?SlyNine - Thursday, November 17, 2011 - link
Raid is only good if you need the uptime. I say go with rolling updates and keep it unplugged unless updating or restoring.On the other hand if you backup up something that takes to much data to have a 1:1 backup, I love flexraid's Snapshot raid. Just create an array with the data drives and create parity on a spare disk ( or multiple spare disks, depending on how many drive failures you want to be protected against). Unlike Raid 5 if the array cannot be rebuild, the drives that still have data remain unaffected.
Snapshot raid is only good for data that doesn't get modified often since you have to run the snapshot raid to update the parity, adding new files doesn't matter, nor do name changes.
Makaveli - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
Don't have a problem with sandforce still a fairly new company so they are learning as for OCZ don't trust them and more so after they pull that bait and switch last year with there SSDs.And its great Quindor that you haven't ran into any issue but I still would never recommend OCZ/Sandforce SSD for anyone that isn't a computer tech.
And even for those that know what they are doing i would advise against it.
There are a few components that reliability matters more than speed and the biggest two for me are memory and storage!
kyuu - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
Reliability only matters more than speed with regards to storage if you're storing important, irreplaceable data on the storage medium. If you're putting that sort of data on an SSD, as a consumer, you're doing it wrong. That sort of data is fine on a large, mechanical drive since it probably isn't speed sensitive and it should be backed up somewhere anyway.SSD, for now, is for OS, swap drive, and performance sensitive applications. In the unlikely event your drive does die, all you've lost is the OS and applications which can be easily reinstalled... and if you're that worried about it, you should have an image of the drive backed up which you can quickly copy to a replacement drive.
Beenthere - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
In other words SSDs are unreliable. We knew that several posts ago. :)Quindor - Thursday, November 17, 2011 - link
I do not agree.Disks fail, SSD's fail. For some reason a lot of people are convinced that SSD's are the holy grail and will never fail like mechanical disks did.... but they fail sometimes, just as mechanical drives do, just in a different way.
Go RAID-1, make backups. Like your used to doing and you'll have no problems with your data.
Crashing, BSOD's and such still sucks though. From what I read, the newest firmwares fixes this for most if not all people, but still that is hard to deal with.
Further I don't understand why everyone is bashing OCZ... all current SandForce products suffer the same problem? From what I can see, OCZ support has been excellent in replacement drives, etc.
Just trying to put the blame at the right place.
bryanW1995 - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
It would have to be free for me to look at anything from OCZ ever again.skiboysteve - Thursday, November 17, 2011 - link
when I enter BLKNOVSSD it says "Although you've entered a valid promo code BLKNOVSSD, your order does not currently meet the code's usage criteria."I've tried many different OCZ SSDs but it doesnt work
Zok - Thursday, November 17, 2011 - link
Well, that was crap. It was ONLY valid yesterday. Thanks NewEgg. Not.Coup27 - Thursday, November 17, 2011 - link
As somebody from the UK, we do not have MIR and I really cannot understand the point of them either. From the outside, they seem to create work for everybody involved which ultimately achieves the same result as an additional discount to the product before sale. Am I missing something?The sales we have here are are always "x percentage off".
chadwick21 - Thursday, November 17, 2011 - link
I envy you. MIRs are a ripoff. They are just a way to sucker someone in knowing damn well that most of the rebates do not get sent back. It is a marketing ploy plain and simple. They should be outlawed IMO.DanNeely - Sunday, November 20, 2011 - link
But that'll never happen since sales/business taxes are paid on the preMIR price.chadwick21 - Thursday, November 17, 2011 - link
Darn the luck. I ordered 3 OCZ Agility 3 120GB drives last week.I completed my first build with one of the Agility 3's yesterday and have had zero problems so far. The speed of these drives rock.
I also own a 3.5" Vertex II 60 GB, two Agility 60GBs and an original Vertex 60GB. I have never had a problem with any of these drives (fingers crossed with the other 2 Agility 3's.) I'll stick with OCZ until they make me a believer in all this negativity in the comments I've been reading. So far, I'm as happy as can be and the performance is top notch.
My only tip with the Agility 3 is to make sure you set the controller to AHCI in the BIOS right from the get go. Then once you have everything loaded, run WEI so Win7 turns on the SSD settings. I dunno, maybe I'm just lucky with the drives. /shrug
I wish I was lucky with the timing on the purchase lol
Beenthere - Thursday, November 17, 2011 - link
When your current SSDs go tits-up, maybe the next gen will be on sale in Jan. '12.0ldman79 - Friday, November 18, 2011 - link
All hard drives prices have gone up on Newegg.com and a few other sites I've been checking. This 15% off is likely still more expensive than the drive was a month ago.OCZ 120GB Vertex Plus was $119, now it is $144. Seagate Hybrid 500GB was $99, now is $159.
ppro - Thursday, November 24, 2011 - link
clever idea to clear the junk OCZ SSD off the shelves...