As this is my first post on this article please allow me to identify myself as an OCZ representative.
Hi Zodiacsoulmate thank you for your comment. We do feel like PFM+ helps add more protection for power users and ultimately it was our goal with this drive to create a product that delivered both high performance and enhanced reliability by leveraging some of the features from our enterprise drives.
Thank you for your business and we are sorry that you have had issues with any of our drives in the past and in regards to the very first Vector drives we have released a firmware update that addresses sudden power loss issues. If you currently are experiencing any issues please do not hesitate to contact our support team and we will be happy to support you.
Over the last two years we have made significant upgrades in our products and processes to impact quality and continue to make investments in this area. All of our drives leverage premium Toshiba NAND and that complete access to next generation flash is enabling us to develop some very exciting new solutions that are both focused on enhancing performance and driving down cost.
wow cool man, yea quite some vectors died but the 5 year warranty got them all replace, one 256gb died so many times that OCZ replaced it with a vector150 which is running strong since then...
Hi Zodiacsoultmate. Thanks very much for the feedback and glad to hear that your Vector 150 has been running great. Again sorry that you had issues with the original Vector and thank you very much for your business. We have made significant changes and improvements to both products and processes and will continue to moving forward. Thanks for sticking with us.
I've had two failed OCZ drives, one DOA and the replacement 8 months later. The packaged replacement (unopened) was sold on eBay out of fear, at which point OCZ was sworn off.
I believe in redemption, and I'll be watching the consumer feedback. Good luck.
Hi Spoogie. Thank you for your comments and your business. I am sorry to hear that you had issues in the past. I know it is easy to say but we are a completely different company/organization today as part of the Toshiba Group. We certainly realize we need to continue to work diligently to support our customers and appreciate the feedback and open dialogue.
I had two expensive (at the time) Vertex 2 drives. One bricked after about two weeks. The RMA drive bricked immediately when updating the firmware. I have the replacement drive but I don't trust it enough to use it. The other drive I bought worked through several firmware updates (a few months) but bricked after I put my second Macbook Pro to sleep. I was busy with graduate school and a job and didn't have a chance to update my backup and part of the next day's final presentation for a course and also some important poetry. I had been lulled into a false sense of security because the drive had operated with no trouble for several months.
When Anandtech wrote about how OCZ started selling Vertex 2 drives with half the NAND chips in them, without changing the specs, it didn't say anything about reduced reliability. However, from my experience and from what I've seen from comments on the Net (such as Amazon reviews), the failure rate for these drives was extremely high. Also, when OCZ offered a replacement option for those burned by the bait and switch hidden 32-bit NAND (full chip complement) to 64-bit NAND (half the chips) transition -- it never offered it for the 240 GB model. One of Anandtech's writers also said they didn't experience failures with their Vertex 2 drives but those were most likely all 32-bit NAND drives.
OCZ never released a utility for dealing with bricked Sandforce drives due to their "panic mode" that would help users get some data recovered. Instead, their forum staff just said "RMA or send to DriveSavers". From what I gathered from my Google searches, the panic mode (which Anandtech's Vertex 2 reviews didn't mention as I recall) was designed to protect Sandforce's flaky firmware from reverse-engineering at the cost of making it extremely difficult (impossible for consumers without spending thousands for DriveSavers) to obtain their data. And, since these drives love to corrupt themselves at the drop of a hat (possibly due to deduplication of critical filesystem data), it's unlikely that most of the panicking is caused by serious problems with the drives like the actual failure of a NAND chip.
So, it seems like I received a product that not only had a poorly-engineered anti-consumer controller but which also had half the NAND chips and thus the loss of performance, capacity, and apparently also stability. I think these Vertex drives were rated at 1 1/2 stars on Amazon or something similarly low. I also remember reading about a lot of problems with Vertex 3/Agility 3 drives so it seems that the continuing defectiveness of the OCZ/Sandforce combination moved forward past the Vertex 2 era and the first-generation controller.
"it's unlikely that most of the panicking is caused by serious problems with the drives like the actual failure of a NAND chip."
Although there is also a rumor that part of the failure rate is due to OCZ using its own NAND which may not be as reliable as less generic NAND. Rumors abound but concrete information is hard to come by because the whole mess was brushed under the rug.
I was also the lucky owner of an IBM 75GXP "Deathstar" hard disk so I have an almost supernatural knack for picking the worst possible drives for my data apparently. Like the Vertex 2, the Deathstar was hyped by reviews for being so wonderfully quick — until they started to blow up.
Actually, all consumer drives need power loss protection and they realistically need it much more than drives targeted at the actual enterprise side of the market. It comes down to simple probabilities. The average enterprise SSD is going to be backed by at least 1 additional layer of power loss prevention (UPS et al), have a robust backup infrastructure, and likely mirroring (offsite) on top.
In contrast, consumer drives are unlikely to have any power loss prevention, unlikely to have anything approaching a backup infrastructure, and highly unlikely to have robust data resiliency(offsite mirroring et al).
So like many others, Anandtech gets it exactly wrong wrt PLP and SSDs. The fact that manufacturers have been able to get away without providing PLP on consumer SSDs is almost criminal. The fact that review sites accept this as perfectly OK is pretty much criminal on their part.
And what should pretty much be a rage storm for consumers is the actual cost of providing PLP on an SSD is literally a couple of $ in capacitors. Not to mention many consumer drives without PLP have enterprise drives using the exact same PCB with PLP. That we as consumers have allowed companies to have PLP as a point of differentiation is to our great detriment, esp when the actual cost of PLP is in the noise even for cheap low capacity SSDs.
If a drive cannot survive a power loss with data integrity then it certainly shouldn't get a recommendation nor should any consumer even consider it.
You do raise some very good points. I think the enterprise still needs it because they want as many ways to protect the data that they can get, after all it's only a couple of bucks. The consumer would benefit to a greater degree since that is likely all they would have is the caps in the SSD. However the consumer is their own worse enemy, a couple of bucks makes a difference for most consumers.
I've had no issues, and until I read this article, gave no thought to pulling power on a system using an SSD! And I've done it ALOT! Not a single bad block yet! And that is with 6 SSD's in various machines from 4 manufacturers and 8 product lines. Though none of them with Windows, all Linux and OS X.
Sometimes I wonder just how wide spread issues really are. On the internet it's hard to tell since it's the angry people doing most of the posting.
In the end though whether you area company or individual, if it isn't backed up. you really don't need it.
I do an image of my system SSD every week and my computer is always plugged into a UPS, and yes, that's my home setup. The power is my area is known to be dirty power, not complete drop-outs but if you measured the voltage output it would make most electrical engineers shake their heads and smack their foreheads.
That's a step in the right direction; but is still last years product. Acronis 2015 is already out. Am I overly cynical for thinking Acronis offered the 2014 version at a discount hoping to make it up by convincing some of the SSD buyers to upgrade to the new version after installing?
Acronis TrueImage 2015 is complete shit. Check the Acronis forums: most people (like myself - a paying annual customer since 2010) have gone back to 2014. The most recent update (October) still did not fix issues with image compatibility, GPT partition compatibility (added for 2015) and UEFI boot mapping. Aside from the lingering compatibility, reliability and stability issues, the interface is terrible. They've basically turned it into a backup product for single PC's instead of a imaging product. Even the USB bootable ISO I typically boot off a flash drive for imaging/cloning is inherently unstable and occasionally even corrupts the destination. Nobody has confirmed the "Universal Restore" works for Windows 7, yet another broken feature that worked FINE in 2014.
Acronis lost me as a long-time customer to Miray because 2015 was SO botched and after waiting months for them to fix it, I gave up and had to find a product that could adequately clone UEFI OS's installed on GPT partitions. I use this product almost daily to upgrade PC's to SSD's. Unfortunately Miray's boot environment is a little slower, even with the verification disabled and "fast copy" turned on, likely because it runs a different USB stack.
I don't blame OCZ for sticking with 2014 like every other Acronis licensee has, including Crucial and Intel. 2014 is mature and stable, but it is not the modern solution - especially with Windows 10 around the corner. Acronis will forfeit this market to Miray or in-house solutions like Samsungs' Clonemaster if they don't get their act together. It's just astonishing how well Acronis was doing until 2015.
I distinctly remember that when I replaced a SSD in my workstation the Acronis tool, instead of copying my data from the source SSD to the new SSD copied the data to another, unrelated HDD in the system, happily overwriting the Linux partitions stored thereon... I had to unplug everything from the mainboard safe for the old and new SSD to make sure that it doesn't destroy any more of my data.
Hello The_Assimilator. Thanks for your comments. Innovation is definitely a key area of focus for us on both the client and enterprise sides of our SSD business. We currently have a lot of resources put on next generation controllers and have been working hard on client SSDs leveraging the latest Toshiba NAND flash, which includes TLC. While some of these products are on the horizon it was natural for us to update our Vector Series with A19 NAND flash, and rather than just make a NAND change we wanted to add new features not normally found in our client class products like power fail management plus (PFM+) to further improve reliability in applications that blur the line between enthusiast and workstation.
It is true that Barefoot 3 has, and continues to be, a very strong platform for us as we have shipped so many drives based on this in-house controller, and it has been so solid that we have not had to rev silicon a single time. We will continue to push to innovate when it comes to SSD performance, features and cost and are committed to delivering more value for all our customers. Thanks again for your feedback.
The bigger problem is that the SSD market has stagnated. When their weren't major players (like Samsung) the little guy could cobble something together and make a decent living filling what was a niche market. Now SSDs are mainstream, and through volume alone the big guys can overpower the little guys, let alone R&D, etc. Until the market shifts away from SATA there's no room for niche innovation or clever advances. It's all down to margins right now.
You do realize the two best-selling controllers are Marvell and Sandforce, and both are older than Barefoot 3. The SF2281 is 3+ years old and still ships in a variety of Mushkin, ADATA, Intel, etc SSD's.
Barefoot 3 is thoroughly modern, but it does lack some power saving and drive encryption features. I don't think it makes sense for OCZ to update it when PCIe is around the corner and will require a new controller since a bridge will be expensive and not much faster.
Aside from that, Barefoot 3 is incredibly innovative. I consider it the best controller available aside from Intel's 3rd gen controller (equally as old) and Samsung's MEX. ASMedia is still a little inconsistent and featureless, Marvell has an aging indirection table implementation that yields average performance, Phison is clearly entry-level with relatively low performance and consistency, Silicon Motion and Fusion-IO are power hungry, have quirks with certain NAND varieties and are not cost competitive.
"There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again."
Yeah, George, I'm not planning on getting fooled by OCZ again.
None of the benchmarks include the EVO, so it's hard to tell if it beats it or not. It is probably faster, but the MSRP is the same as the 850 Pro, which definitely beats it in most tests.
Hi CaedenV, thank you for your feedback. The Vector 180 is designed for the high performance/workstation market and is not positioned versus the TLC based EVO. When it comes to best balance of performance/value our ARC series (based on MLC). We will be coming out with future products that push the value envelope that leverage Toshiba TLC.
I was impressed with the Arc 100, it was quicker than I expected. Any data yet on return rates? It would be interesting to know if it's been competitive with the 850 EVO in that regard. Samsung has a strong reputation here. My main concern with the Vector 180 though is it will appear too expensive compared to the 850 Pro and SanDisk Extreme Pro.
Hi chrnochime, thank you for your comments. We so agree there are still a lot of customers that would still prefer MLC. Our current value drive series is MLC based and even after we introduce a TLC based Series we will continue to deliver MLC drives for those customers that are looking for drives higher up the performance spectrum.
Isn't it a crime to put Samsung and support in the same sentence? That companies Achilles heal is complete lack of support. Look at all the people with GalaxyS3's and smart tv's that were left out to dry the moment next gen models came out. And on a polarizingly opposite end of the spectrum is Apple who still supports the nearly 4 year old iPhone 4S. I'm no Apple fan but that is commendable and something all companies should pay attention too. Customer support pays off.
Apple did a shit job with the white Core Duo iMacs which all develop bad pixel lines. We had fourteen in a lab and all of them developed the problem. Apple also dropped the ball on people with the 8600 GT and similar Nvidia GPUs in their Macbook Pros by refusing to replace the defective GPUs with anything other than new defective GPUs. Both, as far as I know, caused class-action lawsuits.
I forgot to mention that not only did Apple not actually fix the problem with those bad GPUs, customers would have to jump through a bunch of hoops like bringing their machines to an Apple Store so someone there could decide if they qualify or not for a replacement defective GPU.
I am curious, does the drive return a write IO as complete as soon as it is stored in the DRAM?
If so, this drive could be fantastic to use as a ZFS ZIL.
Think of it this way: you partition it so the size does not exceed the DRAM size (e.g. 512MB), and use that partition as ZIL. The small partition size guarantees that any writes to the drive fit in DRAM, and the PFM guarantees there is no loss. This is similar in concept to short-stroking hard drives with a spinning platter.
For those of you that don't know, ZFS performance is significantly enhanced by the existence of a ZIL device with very low latency (and DRAM on board this drive should fit that bill). A fast ZIL is particularly important for people who use NFS as a datastore for VMWare. This is because VMWare forces NFS to Sync write IOs, even if your ZFS config is to not require sync. This device may or may not perform as well as a DDRDRIVE (ddrdrive.com) but it comes in at about 1/20th the price so it is a very promising idea!
ocztosh -- has your team considered the use of this device as a ZFS array ZIL device like i describe above?
PFM+ is limited to protecting the NAND mapping table, so any user data will still be lost in case of a sudden power loss. Hence the Vector 180 isn't really suitable for the scenario you described.
OK good to know. To be honest though, what matters more in this scenario (for me) is if the device returns a write io as successful immediately when it is stored in DRAM, or if it waits until it is stored in flash.
As nils_ mentions below, a UPS is another way of partially mitigating a power failure. In my case, the battery backup is a nice to have rather than a must have.
One minor addition... OCZ was clearly thinking about ZFS ZIL devices when they announced prototype devices called "Aeon" about 2 years ago. They even blogged about this use case: http://eblog.ocz.com/ssd-powered-clouds-times-chan...
Unfortunately OCZ never brought these drives to market (I wish they did!) so we're stuck waiting for a consumer DRAM device that isn't 10+ year old technology or $2k+ in price tag.
Something like the PMC Flashtec devices? Those are boards with 4-16GiB of DRAM backed by the same size of flash chips and capacitors with a NVMe interface. If the system loses power the DRAM is flushed to flash and restored when the power is back on. This is great for things like ZIL, Journals, doublewrite buffer (like in MySQL/MariaDB), ceph journals etc..
And before it comes up, a UPS can fail too (I've seen it happen more often than I'd like to count).
I saw those PMC Flashtec devices as well and they look promising, but I don't see any for sale yet. Hopefully they don't become vaporware like OCZ Aeon drives.
Also, in my opinion I prefer a SATAIII or SAS interface over PCI-e, because (in theory) a SATA/SAS device will work in almost any motherboard on any Operating System without special drivers, whereas PCI-e devices will need special device drivers for each OS. Obviously, waiting for drivers to be created limits which systems a device can be used in.
True PCI-e will definitely have greater throughput than SATA/SAS, but the ZFS ZIL use case needs very low latency and NOT necessarily high throughput. I haven't seen any data indicating that PCI-e is any better/worse on IO latency than SATA/SAS.
I think that the Crucial MX 100 will be a bit faster than the Vector 180 under typical usage, though the Vector 180 does outperform the MX 100 on some benchmarks. Both drives have partial power loss protection. The Vector 180 has a 5 year warranty vs. the 3 year warranty on the MX 100, but a lot of people will be looking to upgrade from SATA to PCIe SSD's before the 3 year warranty expires. In short, I don't see any reason to pay a premium price for the Vector 180.
If only HIPM+DIPM worked (yes I know its a hardware limitation of the platform) this looks like it'd be a great laptop SSD due to such low power consumption in the various workloads measured here.
Two dead OCZ drives - there will never be a 3rd one. One of the drives was from the era of the bitcoins boom ( when they were easy to mine). Lost 150 coins there ( that's over $50 000). They stupid thing locked up due to power issues ( too many power cycles).
Well the thing is, the internals are drastically different right now.
I've been in the market for a good SSD for a while. These drives seem to perform well. Sadly outperformed by the 850 Pro drives, but I do think that the enclosure is actually very aesthetically pleasing. If the cost could be driven down a lot, I'd be very interested in the 180.
You're right, they need to have a price advantage with the 180 to pull people in. Also, availability needs to be good - in the past it's been rather sketchy with the 150, which means prices tend to creep up from a small number of suppliers.
I've owned i think three OCZ drives in the past, they've all bricked on me within about a year. Never again will I purchase their shoddy products. While i was able to get warranty replacments each time, and the customer service is decent, the product itself is just not reliable in any way. I don't know if the new ones are improved at all, but i'm not risking MY data to find out.
Hello FalcomPSX, thank you for your comments and sorry to hear that you has a problem with previous drives. We are a new organization under Toshiba and have made significant changes to everything from processes to production. We understand how you feel and hope that one day we will have the opportunity to demonstrate the reliability of our current products. Thank you again for your feedback
Battery backup should be built into the PSU for workstations and servers, google does this for their data centers.. why shouldn't servers and workstations. All you need is 1 minute for the average workstation to go into hibernation until power is back on IMO.
It's an interesting concept (especially when the Datacenter uses a DC Distribution instead of AC), but I don't know if I would be comfortable with batteries in everything. A capacitor holds less of a charge but doesn't deteriorate over time and the only component that really needs to stay on is the drive (or RAID controller if you're into that).
"I don't think it has been significant enough to warrant physical power loss protection for all client SSDs."
If a drive reports a flush as complete, the operating system must be confident that the data is already written to the underlying device. Any drive that doesn't deliver this is quite simply defective by design. Back in the day this was already a problem with some IDE and SATA drives, they reported a write operation as complete once the data hit the drive cache. Just because something is rated as consumer grade does not mean that they should ship defective devices.
Even worse is that instead of losing the last few writes you'll potentially lose all the data stored on the drive.
If I don't care whether the data makes it to the drive I can solve that in software.
If a drive receive an ATA FLUSH command, it _will_ write to stable storage (HDD platters or NAND chips) before returning. For unimportant writes (the ones not marked with FUA or encapsulated into an ATA FLUSH) the drive is allowed to store data into cache and return _before_ the data hit the actual permanent storage.
SSDs adds another problem: by the very nature of MCL and TLC cells, data at rest (already comitted to stable storage) are at danger by the partial page write effect. So, PMF+ and Crucial's consumer drive Power Loss Protection are _required_ for reliable use of the drive. Drives that don't use at least partial power loss protection should use a write-through (read-only cache) approach at least for the NAND mapping table or very frequent flushes of the mapping table (eg: Sandisk)
"That said, while drive bricking due to mapping table corruption has always been a concern, I don't think it has been significant enough to warrant physical power loss protection for all client SSDs."
I see you never owned 240 GB Vertex 2 drives with 25nm NAND.
"PFM+ will protect data that has already been written to the NAND"
They should be able to do this by scanning NAND. The capacitor probably makes life easier, but with better firmware design this should not be necessary.
With the capacitor, the steady state performance should be consistent, as they won't need to flush mapping table to NAND regularly.
Since this is also not the case, this points to bad firmware design
Hello Marraco, thank you for your feedback and sorry to hear that you had an issue with the Vertex 2. That particular drive was Sandforce based and there was no software to unbrick it unfortunately, nor did the previous organization have the source code for firmware. This was actually one of the reasons that drove the company to push to develop in-house controllers and firmware, so we could control these elements which ultimately impacts product design and support.
Please do contact our support team and reference this thread. Even though this is a legacy product we would be more than happy to help and provide support. Thank you again for your comments and we look forward to supporting you.
Indeed, the Vertex4 and Vector series are massively more reliable, but the OCZ haters ignore them entirely, focusing on the old Vertex2 series, etc. OCZ could have handled some of the support issues back then better, but the later products were more reliable anyway so it was much less of an issue. With the newer warranty structure, Toshiba ownership & NAND, etc., it's a very different company.
Irony is, I have over two dozen Vertex2E units and they're all working fine (most are 120s, with a sprinkling of 60s and 240s). One of them is an early 3.5" V2E 120GB, used in an SGI Fuel for several years, never a problem (recently replaced with a 2.5" V2E 240GB).
Btw ocztosh, I've been talking to some OCZ people recently about why certain models force a 3gbit SAS controller to negotiate only a 1.5gbit link when connected to a SATA3 SSD. This occurs with the Vertex3/4, Vector, etc., whereas connecting the SATA2 V2E correctly results in a 3Gbit link. Note I've observed similar behaviour with other brands, ditto other SATA2 SSDs (eg. SF-based Corsair F60, 3Gbit link selected ok). The OCZ people I talked to said there's nothing they can do to fix whatever the issue might be, but what I'm interested in is why it happens; if I can find that out then maybe I can figure a workaround. I'm using LSI 1030-based PCIe cards, eg. SAS3442, SAS3800, SAS3041, etc. I'd welcome your thoughts on the issue. Would be nice to get a Vertex4 running with a 3Gbit link in a Fuel, Tezro or Origin/Onyx.
Note I've been using the Vertex4 as a replacement for ancient 1GB SCSI disks in Stoll/SIRIX systems used by textile manufacturers, works rather well. Despite the low bandwidth limit of FastSCSI2 (10MB/sec), it still cut the time for a full backup from 30 mins to just 6 mins (tens of thousands of small pattern files). Alas, with the Vertex4 no longer available, I switched to the Crucial M550 (since it does have proper PLP). I'd been hoping to use the V180 instead, but its lack of full PLP is an issue.
In my view the performance consistency basically blows the lid off of OCZ and the reliability of their Barefoot controller. Despite reporting from most outlets, for years now drives based off of this technology have suffered massive failure rates due to sudden power loss. Here we have definitive evidence of those flaws and the lengths OCZ is going to in order to work around them (note, i didn't say 'fix' them).
The fact that they were willing to go to the extra cost of adding the power loss module in addition to crippling the sustained performance of their flagship drive in order to flush the cache out of DRAM speaks VOLUMES about how bad their reliability was before. You don't go to such extreme - potentially kiss of death measures - without a good boot up your ass pushing you headlong toward them. In this case said boot was constructed purely out of OCZ's fear that releasing yet ANOTHER poorly constructed drive would finally put their reputation out of it's misery for good and kill any chance a future sales.
OCZ has cornered themselves in a no win scenario:
1) They don't bother making the drive reliable and in doing so save the cost of the power loss module and keep the sustained speed of the Vector 180 high. The drive reviews well with no craters in performance and the few customers OCZ has left buy another doomed Barefoot SSD that's practically guaranteed to brick on them within a few months. As a result they loose those customers for good along with their company.
or
2) The go to the cost of adding the power loss module and cripple the drives performance to ensure that the drive is reliable. The drive reviews horribly and no one buys it.
This is their position. Kiss of death indeed.
Ultimately, i think it speaks to how complicated controller development is and that if you don't have a huge company with millions of R&D funds at your disposal it's probably best if you don't throw your hat into that ring. It's a shame but it seems to be the way high tech works. (Global oligopoly, here we come.)
All things considered, it's nice that this is finally all out in the open.
Fool me once, shame on, shame on me. A fool me can't get fooled again.
I *KNEW* OCZ was a garbage company after all the havoc they caused in the late 90s/early 00s with their crap memory products. It sounded alarm bells in my head that reminded me of their fake address that was literally an empty storefront.
But I read all the press, heard how it was just the same name but a different backing company. So I bought one of their SSDs like a fool, only to send it back multiple times and everytime have it die again. I still have an 80GB intel SSD I bought several years before the OCZ that's still kicking.
After all that, I find out the same crook selling crap memory was behind the "new" OCZ. Pulling his same parlor tricks giving review sites hand-picked models and sending bottom barrel reject flash to customers. You should just refuse to review any more of their hardware, they're crooks and their wares are trash.
Just picked up a Samsung 850 Evo for $204 at Microcenter (price matched to Newegg), last Saturday. Don't understand the justification by OCZ to price the 480GB version at $275.
As I understand the intent of this product, it's aimed at the likes of the Extreme Pro and 850 Pro. The Arc 100 is the mainstream competitor to the EVO, which is $196 on newegg for the 480GB.
oh, I see. What I didn't take into account was the fairly inexpensive nature of 3D-Nand production. So Samsung has an edge it seems, to set their mid-range drives at that price.
Ive had nothing but bad experience with OCZ. I had mem go bad, rma and sold them. I had the core 64 SSD that the company knew were problematic and still didnt have integrity to not sell them. that core SSD cost me quite chunk of money and I suffered with that. I never for
I hope they go out of business and stop selling their gear to the public. we need companies with reliable gear.
Hello rocketman122, thank you for your comments and sorry to hear that you had issues with the Core Series. The old company no longer exists and the IP was purchased by Toshiba. As OCZ Storage Solutions - A Toshiba Group Company we have completely redone our products and processes and there has been a great focus on quality throughout the organization. Everything from the product design cycle through manufacturing has been updated. By implementing our own in-house controller and firmware technology and having access to premium Toshiba NAND we are now able to impact this better than ever. We believe we have a very competitive offering today when it comes to reliability and product quality and hope that we will have the opportunity to prove it to you in the future. Thank you again for your previous business.
It's coming. This month has been full of NDAs, which have postponed the BX100 review, but once I'm done with next week's NDAs the BX100 will be getting my full attention :)
Looks like an overpriced product that doesn't stack up against competition in the same price range. Given OCZ's extensive track record of failures and attempts to use their user base as unpaid beta testers I can understand their desire to include a feature to give more peace of mind, but in reality it's just not that useful and certainly insufficient to overcome years of accumulated ill will.
On a $, performance, reliability, endurance, warranty basis, the OCZ 180 falls significantly short of even the consumer grade competition (e.g. Crucial or Samsung).
Unfortunately, the OCZ story when from deceiving investors, to customers, ending in bankruptcy.
Hi LB-ID, thank you for your feedback. We have shipped countless Barefoot 3 based drives across multiple series products and never once had to rev silicon. We have made updates to firmware to continually improve our products. The addition of the PFM+ feature was a decision to support customers that are really on the edge of enthusiast and workstation. This is a required feature for many enterprise drives and we felt there was a value to including this feature into our Vector 180 Series. We agree that not every customer necessarily needs this feature, and for those customers across the client spectrum we have other BF3 based drives that do not include the additional circuitry, but for those customers that really would like that extra layer of protection we were able to integrate this feature without a price premium over our previous Vector 150 Series. We have already received a very positive response from some users but will continue to offer a range of drives to meet the needs of different user applications.
Wow, great review and a ton of new tests and data. The bathtub curve on the mixed sequential read/write performance will be very interesting to compare to forthcoming NVMe drives. I was surprised by how much the IOPS were reduced by commingling of sequential reads/writes. Seems to be room for improvement in this area.
Hello Ethos Evoss. We are sorry that you feel this way and/or if you had a negative experience in the past. We are indeed now part of Toshiba and OCZ Storage Solutions is a very different organization as a subsidiary of Toshiba. Toshiba has provided the ability to vastly enhance resources for product development as well as given us complete access to their premium NAND. We certainly will continue to strive to meet the high expectations of you, our valued customers. Thank you again for your input.
Nice in depth analysis Anandtech! Read the article as I'm receiving a new Vector 180 240GB drive this week as my original Vector bricked itself earlier this month after around 2 years of service. I have to say that I'm really impressed with OCZ's customer service as I couriered the drive last week and will be receiving a brand new and latest SSD in return this week. Fortunately I had my data backed up as it really just died without any warning. Based on the analysis I was also thinking this would be a killer laptop drive, till I saw the lack of slumber support which is a bit of a disappointment and opportunity missed. Still the PFM+ and low power usage is also most welcome in my workstation PC. We have regular power cuts in my country so its great to have that extra peace of mind.
Hello guys. I would like to ask how exactly this Storage Bench - Light is designed. The description says it is designed to be an accurate illustration of basic usage with Total IO Operations 832,339, Total GB Read 17.97 and Total GB Written 23.25. With its 23 GB of writes it should account for roughly two or three days of average usage (i.e. 7-11GB per day).
How long (typically) does it take to finish this bench? Is it designed to last for few hours (which would account for a typical daily use) or is it designed to finish as fast as possible, in few minutes perhaps?
I am aware that most likely it is a rhetorical question but can anyone from AnandTech answer it, please? I just wanted to be sure about that benchmark.
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zodiacsoulmate - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
PFM is so much needed for ocz drives... almost all my dead vector drives are because of sudden power loss...ocztosh - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
As this is my first post on this article please allow me to identify myself as an OCZ representative.Hi Zodiacsoulmate thank you for your comment. We do feel like PFM+ helps add more protection for power users and ultimately it was our goal with this drive to create a product that delivered both high performance and enhanced reliability by leveraging some of the features from our enterprise drives.
Thank you for your business and we are sorry that you have had issues with any of our drives in the past and in regards to the very first Vector drives we have released a firmware update that addresses sudden power loss issues. If you currently are experiencing any issues please do not hesitate to contact our support team and we will be happy to support you.
Over the last two years we have made significant upgrades in our products and processes to impact quality and continue to make investments in this area. All of our drives leverage premium Toshiba NAND and that complete access to next generation flash is enabling us to develop some very exciting new solutions that are both focused on enhancing performance and driving down cost.
zodiacsoulmate - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
wow cool man, yea quite some vectors died but the 5 year warranty got them all replace, one 256gb died so many times that OCZ replaced it with a vector150 which is running strong since then...ocztosh - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
Hi Zodiacsoultmate. Thanks very much for the feedback and glad to hear that your Vector 150 has been running great. Again sorry that you had issues with the original Vector and thank you very much for your business. We have made significant changes and improvements to both products and processes and will continue to moving forward. Thanks for sticking with us.Spoogie - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
Glad to see you're watching.I've had two failed OCZ drives, one DOA and the replacement 8 months later. The packaged replacement (unopened) was sold on eBay out of fear, at which point OCZ was sworn off.
I believe in redemption, and I'll be watching the consumer feedback. Good luck.
ocztosh - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
Hi Spoogie. Thank you for your comments and your business. I am sorry to hear that you had issues in the past. I know it is easy to say but we are a completely different company/organization today as part of the Toshiba Group. We certainly realize we need to continue to work diligently to support our customers and appreciate the feedback and open dialogue.Oxford Guy - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
I had two expensive (at the time) Vertex 2 drives. One bricked after about two weeks. The RMA drive bricked immediately when updating the firmware. I have the replacement drive but I don't trust it enough to use it. The other drive I bought worked through several firmware updates (a few months) but bricked after I put my second Macbook Pro to sleep. I was busy with graduate school and a job and didn't have a chance to update my backup and part of the next day's final presentation for a course and also some important poetry. I had been lulled into a false sense of security because the drive had operated with no trouble for several months.When Anandtech wrote about how OCZ started selling Vertex 2 drives with half the NAND chips in them, without changing the specs, it didn't say anything about reduced reliability. However, from my experience and from what I've seen from comments on the Net (such as Amazon reviews), the failure rate for these drives was extremely high. Also, when OCZ offered a replacement option for those burned by the bait and switch hidden 32-bit NAND (full chip complement) to 64-bit NAND (half the chips) transition -- it never offered it for the 240 GB model. One of Anandtech's writers also said they didn't experience failures with their Vertex 2 drives but those were most likely all 32-bit NAND drives.
OCZ never released a utility for dealing with bricked Sandforce drives due to their "panic mode" that would help users get some data recovered. Instead, their forum staff just said "RMA or send to DriveSavers". From what I gathered from my Google searches, the panic mode (which Anandtech's Vertex 2 reviews didn't mention as I recall) was designed to protect Sandforce's flaky firmware from reverse-engineering at the cost of making it extremely difficult (impossible for consumers without spending thousands for DriveSavers) to obtain their data. And, since these drives love to corrupt themselves at the drop of a hat (possibly due to deduplication of critical filesystem data), it's unlikely that most of the panicking is caused by serious problems with the drives like the actual failure of a NAND chip.
So, it seems like I received a product that not only had a poorly-engineered anti-consumer controller but which also had half the NAND chips and thus the loss of performance, capacity, and apparently also stability. I think these Vertex drives were rated at 1 1/2 stars on Amazon or something similarly low. I also remember reading about a lot of problems with Vertex 3/Agility 3 drives so it seems that the continuing defectiveness of the OCZ/Sandforce combination moved forward past the Vertex 2 era and the first-generation controller.
Oxford Guy - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
"it's unlikely that most of the panicking is caused by serious problems with the drives like the actual failure of a NAND chip."Although there is also a rumor that part of the failure rate is due to OCZ using its own NAND which may not be as reliable as less generic NAND. Rumors abound but concrete information is hard to come by because the whole mess was brushed under the rug.
Oxford Guy - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
I was also the lucky owner of an IBM 75GXP "Deathstar" hard disk so I have an almost supernatural knack for picking the worst possible drives for my data apparently. Like the Vertex 2, the Deathstar was hyped by reviews for being so wonderfully quick — until they started to blow up.AssBall - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
I had 2 Deathstars and both worked for 4 years. They probably still work. Guess I was lucky.Shark321 - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
Tosh, it's a pity PFM does not work on the internal cache of the drive. You can still get file system damage during a power loss.AVN6293 - Sunday, December 20, 2015 - link
Does this drive support Opal 2.0 eDrive (FIPS/Hippa compliance) ?AVN6293 - Sunday, December 20, 2015 - link
...And can the over provisioning be increased by the user ?ats - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
Actually, all consumer drives need power loss protection and they realistically need it much more than drives targeted at the actual enterprise side of the market. It comes down to simple probabilities. The average enterprise SSD is going to be backed by at least 1 additional layer of power loss prevention (UPS et al), have a robust backup infrastructure, and likely mirroring (offsite) on top.In contrast, consumer drives are unlikely to have any power loss prevention, unlikely to have anything approaching a backup infrastructure, and highly unlikely to have robust data resiliency(offsite mirroring et al).
So like many others, Anandtech gets it exactly wrong wrt PLP and SSDs. The fact that manufacturers have been able to get away without providing PLP on consumer SSDs is almost criminal. The fact that review sites accept this as perfectly OK is pretty much criminal on their part.
And what should pretty much be a rage storm for consumers is the actual cost of providing PLP on an SSD is literally a couple of $ in capacitors. Not to mention many consumer drives without PLP have enterprise drives using the exact same PCB with PLP. That we as consumers have allowed companies to have PLP as a point of differentiation is to our great detriment, esp when the actual cost of PLP is in the noise even for cheap low capacity SSDs.
If a drive cannot survive a power loss with data integrity then it certainly shouldn't get a recommendation nor should any consumer even consider it.
Shiitaki - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
You do raise some very good points. I think the enterprise still needs it because they want as many ways to protect the data that they can get, after all it's only a couple of bucks. The consumer would benefit to a greater degree since that is likely all they would have is the caps in the SSD. However the consumer is their own worse enemy, a couple of bucks makes a difference for most consumers.I've had no issues, and until I read this article, gave no thought to pulling power on a system using an SSD! And I've done it ALOT! Not a single bad block yet! And that is with 6 SSD's in various machines from 4 manufacturers and 8 product lines. Though none of them with Windows, all Linux and OS X.
Sometimes I wonder just how wide spread issues really are. On the internet it's hard to tell since it's the angry people doing most of the posting.
In the end though whether you area company or individual, if it isn't backed up. you really don't need it.
trparky - Wednesday, April 29, 2015 - link
I do an image of my system SSD every week and my computer is always plugged into a UPS, and yes, that's my home setup. The power is my area is known to be dirty power, not complete drop-outs but if you measured the voltage output it would make most electrical engineers shake their heads and smack their foreheads.zodiacsoulmate - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
also the Arconis 2013 is basically useless since it only runs on windows 7....ocztosh - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
Hi Zodiassoulmate, just wanted to confirm that the Vector 180 drives are shipping with Acronis 2014.DanNeely - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
That's a step in the right direction; but is still last years product. Acronis 2015 is already out. Am I overly cynical for thinking Acronis offered the 2014 version at a discount hoping to make it up by convincing some of the SSD buyers to upgrade to the new version after installing?Samus - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
Acronis TrueImage 2015 is complete shit. Check the Acronis forums: most people (like myself - a paying annual customer since 2010) have gone back to 2014. The most recent update (October) still did not fix issues with image compatibility, GPT partition compatibility (added for 2015) and UEFI boot mapping. Aside from the lingering compatibility, reliability and stability issues, the interface is terrible. They've basically turned it into a backup product for single PC's instead of a imaging product. Even the USB bootable ISO I typically boot off a flash drive for imaging/cloning is inherently unstable and occasionally even corrupts the destination. Nobody has confirmed the "Universal Restore" works for Windows 7, yet another broken feature that worked FINE in 2014.Acronis lost me as a long-time customer to Miray because 2015 was SO botched and after waiting months for them to fix it, I gave up and had to find a product that could adequately clone UEFI OS's installed on GPT partitions. I use this product almost daily to upgrade PC's to SSD's. Unfortunately Miray's boot environment is a little slower, even with the verification disabled and "fast copy" turned on, likely because it runs a different USB stack.
I don't blame OCZ for sticking with 2014 like every other Acronis licensee has, including Crucial and Intel. 2014 is mature and stable, but it is not the modern solution - especially with Windows 10 around the corner. Acronis will forfeit this market to Miray or in-house solutions like Samsungs' Clonemaster if they don't get their act together. It's just astonishing how well Acronis was doing until 2015.
nils_ - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
I distinctly remember that when I replaced a SSD in my workstation the Acronis tool, instead of copying my data from the source SSD to the new SSD copied the data to another, unrelated HDD in the system, happily overwriting the Linux partitions stored thereon... I had to unplug everything from the mainboard safe for the old and new SSD to make sure that it doesn't destroy any more of my data.MikeMurphy - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
Macrium Reflect is free and wonderful to use.mapesdhs - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
Yep, MR is what I use, it works very well and has a good interface.
Ian.
JonnyDough - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link
Thirded. It works wonderfully.The_Assimilator - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
OCZ is still beating that Barefoot 3 dead horse for all it's worth. No wonder they went bankrupt. If you don't innovate, you die.ocztosh - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
Hello The_Assimilator. Thanks for your comments. Innovation is definitely a key area of focus for us on both the client and enterprise sides of our SSD business. We currently have a lot of resources put on next generation controllers and have been working hard on client SSDs leveraging the latest Toshiba NAND flash, which includes TLC. While some of these products are on the horizon it was natural for us to update our Vector Series with A19 NAND flash, and rather than just make a NAND change we wanted to add new features not normally found in our client class products like power fail management plus (PFM+) to further improve reliability in applications that blur the line between enthusiast and workstation.It is true that Barefoot 3 has, and continues to be, a very strong platform for us as we have shipped so many drives based on this in-house controller, and it has been so solid that we have not had to rev silicon a single time. We will continue to push to innovate when it comes to SSD performance, features and cost and are committed to delivering more value for all our customers. Thanks again for your feedback.
Minion4Hire - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
The bigger problem is that the SSD market has stagnated. When their weren't major players (like Samsung) the little guy could cobble something together and make a decent living filling what was a niche market. Now SSDs are mainstream, and through volume alone the big guys can overpower the little guys, let alone R&D, etc. Until the market shifts away from SATA there's no room for niche innovation or clever advances. It's all down to margins right now.Samus - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
You do realize the two best-selling controllers are Marvell and Sandforce, and both are older than Barefoot 3. The SF2281 is 3+ years old and still ships in a variety of Mushkin, ADATA, Intel, etc SSD's.Barefoot 3 is thoroughly modern, but it does lack some power saving and drive encryption features. I don't think it makes sense for OCZ to update it when PCIe is around the corner and will require a new controller since a bridge will be expensive and not much faster.
Aside from that, Barefoot 3 is incredibly innovative. I consider it the best controller available aside from Intel's 3rd gen controller (equally as old) and Samsung's MEX. ASMedia is still a little inconsistent and featureless, Marvell has an aging indirection table implementation that yields average performance, Phison is clearly entry-level with relatively low performance and consistency, Silicon Motion and Fusion-IO are power hungry, have quirks with certain NAND varieties and are not cost competitive.
Guspaz - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
"There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again."Yeah, George, I'm not planning on getting fooled by OCZ again.
blue_urban_sky - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
Is that the saying from Tennessee where they cant't remember the proper saying?Guspaz - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
Well, one person in particular had difficulty remembering the proper saying while in Tennessee...Minion4Hire - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
He's quoting George Bush.mapesdhs - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
And hence not exactly a viable rationale for concluding anything about anything.Ian.
CaedenV - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
Cant beat the Evo on price, performance, or support... so then what is the point?kmmatney - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
None of the benchmarks include the EVO, so it's hard to tell if it beats it or not. It is probably faster, but the MSRP is the same as the 850 Pro, which definitely beats it in most tests.ocztosh - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
Hi CaedenV, thank you for your feedback. The Vector 180 is designed for the high performance/workstation market and is not positioned versus the TLC based EVO. When it comes to best balance of performance/value our ARC series (based on MLC). We will be coming out with future products that push the value envelope that leverage Toshiba TLC.mapesdhs - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
I was impressed with the Arc 100, it was quicker than I expected. Any data yet on returnrates? It would be interesting to know if it's been competitive with the 850 EVO in that regard.
Samsung has a strong reputation here. My main concern with the Vector 180 though is it will
appear too expensive compared to the 850 Pro and SanDisk Extreme Pro.
Ian.
chrnochime - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
The point is some ppl don't actually want to use TLC.ocztosh - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
Hi chrnochime, thank you for your comments. We so agree there are still a lot of customers that would still prefer MLC. Our current value drive series is MLC based and even after we introduce a TLC based Series we will continue to deliver MLC drives for those customers that are looking for drives higher up the performance spectrum.chrnochime - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
Support? So how long did that TLC fix take to be available again?nathanddrews - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
This exactly. LOLSamus - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
Isn't it a crime to put Samsung and support in the same sentence? That companies Achilles heal is complete lack of support. Look at all the people with GalaxyS3's and smart tv's that were left out to dry the moment next gen models came out. And on a polarizingly opposite end of the spectrum is Apple who still supports the nearly 4 year old iPhone 4S. I'm no Apple fan but that is commendable and something all companies should pay attention too. Customer support pays off.Oxford Guy - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
Apple did a shit job with the white Core Duo iMacs which all develop bad pixel lines. We had fourteen in a lab and all of them developed the problem. Apple also dropped the ball on people with the 8600 GT and similar Nvidia GPUs in their Macbook Pros by refusing to replace the defective GPUs with anything other than new defective GPUs. Both, as far as I know, caused class-action lawsuits.Oxford Guy - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
I forgot to mention that not only did Apple not actually fix the problem with those bad GPUs, customers would have to jump through a bunch of hoops like bringing their machines to an Apple Store so someone there could decide if they qualify or not for a replacement defective GPU.matt.vanmater - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
I am curious, does the drive return a write IO as complete as soon as it is stored in the DRAM?If so, this drive could be fantastic to use as a ZFS ZIL.
Think of it this way: you partition it so the size does not exceed the DRAM size (e.g. 512MB), and use that partition as ZIL. The small partition size guarantees that any writes to the drive fit in DRAM, and the PFM guarantees there is no loss. This is similar in concept to short-stroking hard drives with a spinning platter.
For those of you that don't know, ZFS performance is significantly enhanced by the existence of a ZIL device with very low latency (and DRAM on board this drive should fit that bill). A fast ZIL is particularly important for people who use NFS as a datastore for VMWare. This is because VMWare forces NFS to Sync write IOs, even if your ZFS config is to not require sync. This device may or may not perform as well as a DDRDRIVE (ddrdrive.com) but it comes in at about 1/20th the price so it is a very promising idea!
ocztosh -- has your team considered the use of this device as a ZFS array ZIL device like i describe above?
Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
PFM+ is limited to protecting the NAND mapping table, so any user data will still be lost in case of a sudden power loss. Hence the Vector 180 isn't really suitable for the scenario you described.matt.vanmater - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
OK good to know. To be honest though, what matters more in this scenario (for me) is if the device returns a write io as successful immediately when it is stored in DRAM, or if it waits until it is stored in flash.As nils_ mentions below, a UPS is another way of partially mitigating a power failure. In my case, the battery backup is a nice to have rather than a must have.
matt.vanmater - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
One minor addition... OCZ was clearly thinking about ZFS ZIL devices when they announced prototype devices called "Aeon" about 2 years ago. They even blogged about this use case:http://eblog.ocz.com/ssd-powered-clouds-times-chan...
Unfortunately OCZ never brought these drives to market (I wish they did!) so we're stuck waiting for a consumer DRAM device that isn't 10+ year old technology or $2k+ in price tag.
nils_ - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
Something like the PMC Flashtec devices? Those are boards with 4-16GiB of DRAM backed by the same size of flash chips and capacitors with a NVMe interface. If the system loses power the DRAM is flushed to flash and restored when the power is back on. This is great for things like ZIL, Journals, doublewrite buffer (like in MySQL/MariaDB), ceph journals etc..And before it comes up, a UPS can fail too (I've seen it happen more often than I'd like to count).
matt.vanmater - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
I saw those PMC Flashtec devices as well and they look promising, but I don't see any for sale yet. Hopefully they don't become vaporware like OCZ Aeon drives.Also, in my opinion I prefer a SATAIII or SAS interface over PCI-e, because (in theory) a SATA/SAS device will work in almost any motherboard on any Operating System without special drivers, whereas PCI-e devices will need special device drivers for each OS. Obviously, waiting for drivers to be created limits which systems a device can be used in.
True PCI-e will definitely have greater throughput than SATA/SAS, but the ZFS ZIL use case needs very low latency and NOT necessarily high throughput. I haven't seen any data indicating that PCI-e is any better/worse on IO latency than SATA/SAS.
KAlmquist - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
Vector 180 vx. MX 100:I think that the Crucial MX 100 will be a bit faster than the Vector 180 under typical usage, though the Vector 180 does outperform the MX 100 on some benchmarks. Both drives have partial power loss protection. The Vector 180 has a 5 year warranty vs. the 3 year warranty on the MX 100, but a lot of people will be looking to upgrade from SATA to PCIe SSD's before the 3 year warranty expires. In short, I don't see any reason to pay a premium price for the Vector 180.
MrCommunistGen - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
If only HIPM+DIPM worked (yes I know its a hardware limitation of the platform) this looks like it'd be a great laptop SSD due to such low power consumption in the various workloads measured here.djsvetljo - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
Two dead OCZ drives - there will never be a 3rd one. One of the drives was from the era of the bitcoins boom ( when they were easy to mine). Lost 150 coins there ( that's over $50 000). They stupid thing locked up due to power issues ( too many power cycles).STAY AWAY FROM OCZ
Antronman - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
Well the thing is, the internals are drastically different right now.I've been in the market for a good SSD for a while. These drives seem to perform well. Sadly outperformed by the 850 Pro drives, but I do think that the enclosure is actually very aesthetically pleasing. If the cost could be driven down a lot, I'd be very interested in the 180.
mapesdhs - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
You're right, they need to have a price advantage with the 180 to pull people in. Also,availability needs to be good - in the past it's been rather sketchy with the 150, which
means prices tend to creep up from a small number of suppliers.
Ian.
mapesdhs - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
More than 30 OCZ drives, all working fine. Some had bad luck, others used Marvell portsand blame OCZ. It varies.
As for coins, well boohoo, not real money unless they're converted back to $.
Ian.
ocztosh - Monday, March 30, 2015 - link
Hi mapesdhs, thank you for your feedback and great to hear the drives are working well for you. We greatly appreciate both your business and support.FalcomPSX - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
I've owned i think three OCZ drives in the past, they've all bricked on me within about a year. Never again will I purchase their shoddy products. While i was able to get warranty replacments each time, and the customer service is decent, the product itself is just not reliable in any way. I don't know if the new ones are improved at all, but i'm not risking MY data to find out.ocztosh - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
Hello FalcomPSX, thank you for your comments and sorry to hear that you has a problem with previous drives. We are a new organization under Toshiba and have made significant changes to everything from processes to production. We understand how you feel and hope that one day we will have the opportunity to demonstrate the reliability of our current products. Thank you again for your feedbackNeatOman - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
Battery backup should be built into the PSU for workstations and servers, google does this for their data centers.. why shouldn't servers and workstations. All you need is 1 minute for the average workstation to go into hibernation until power is back on IMO.nils_ - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
It's an interesting concept (especially when the Datacenter uses a DC Distribution instead of AC), but I don't know if I would be comfortable with batteries in everything. A capacitor holds less of a charge but doesn't deteriorate over time and the only component that really needs to stay on is the drive (or RAID controller if you're into that).nils_ - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
"I don't think it has been significant enough to warrant physical power loss protection for all client SSDs."If a drive reports a flush as complete, the operating system must be confident that the data is already written to the underlying device. Any drive that doesn't deliver this is quite simply defective by design. Back in the day this was already a problem with some IDE and SATA drives, they reported a write operation as complete once the data hit the drive cache. Just because something is rated as consumer grade does not mean that they should ship defective devices.
Even worse is that instead of losing the last few writes you'll potentially lose all the data stored on the drive.
If I don't care whether the data makes it to the drive I can solve that in software.
shodanshok - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
If a drive receive an ATA FLUSH command, it _will_ write to stable storage (HDD platters or NAND chips) before returning. For unimportant writes (the ones not marked with FUA or encapsulated into an ATA FLUSH) the drive is allowed to store data into cache and return _before_ the data hit the actual permanent storage.SSDs adds another problem: by the very nature of MCL and TLC cells, data at rest (already comitted to stable storage) are at danger by the partial page write effect. So, PMF+ and Crucial's consumer drive Power Loss Protection are _required_ for reliable use of the drive. Drives that don't use at least partial power loss protection should use a write-through (read-only cache) approach at least for the NAND mapping table or very frequent flushes of the mapping table (eg: Sandisk)
mapesdhs - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
How do the 850 EVO & Pro deal with this scenario atm?
Ian.
Oxford Guy - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
"That said, while drive bricking due to mapping table corruption has always been a concern, I don't think it has been significant enough to warrant physical power loss protection for all client SSDs."I see you never owned 240 GB Vertex 2 drives with 25nm NAND.
prasun - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
"PFM+ will protect data that has already been written to the NAND"They should be able to do this by scanning NAND. The capacitor probably makes life easier, but with better firmware design this should not be necessary.
With the capacitor, the steady state performance should be consistent, as they won't need to flush mapping table to NAND regularly.
Since this is also not the case, this points to bad firmware design
marraco - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
I have a bricked Vertex 2 resting a meter away. It was so expensive that I cannot resign to trow it at the waste.I will never buy another OCZ product, ever.
OCZ refused to release the software needed to unbrick it. Is just a software problem. OCZ got my money, but refuses to make it work.
Do NOT EVER buy anything from OCZ.
ocztosh - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
Hello Marraco, thank you for your feedback and sorry to hear that you had an issue with the Vertex 2. That particular drive was Sandforce based and there was no software to unbrick it unfortunately, nor did the previous organization have the source code for firmware. This was actually one of the reasons that drove the company to push to develop in-house controllers and firmware, so we could control these elements which ultimately impacts product design and support.Please do contact our support team and reference this thread. Even though this is a legacy product we would be more than happy to help and provide support. Thank you again for your comments and we look forward to supporting you.
mapesdhs - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
Indeed, the Vertex4 and Vector series are massively more reliable, but the OCZ hatersignore them entirely, focusing on the old Vertex2 series, etc. OCZ could have handled
some of the support issues back then better, but the later products were more reliable
anyway so it was much less of an issue. With the newer warranty structure, Toshiba
ownership & NAND, etc., it's a very different company.
Irony is, I have over two dozen Vertex2E units and they're all working fine (most are
120s, with a sprinkling of 60s and 240s). One of them is an early 3.5" V2E 120GB,
used in an SGI Fuel for several years, never a problem (recently replaced with a
2.5" V2E 240GB).
Btw ocztosh, I've been talking to some OCZ people recently about why certain models
force a 3gbit SAS controller to negotiate only a 1.5gbit link when connected to a SATA3
SSD. This occurs with the Vertex3/4, Vector, etc., whereas connecting the SATA2 V2E
correctly results in a 3Gbit link. Note I've observed similar behaviour with other brands,
ditto other SATA2 SSDs (eg. SF-based Corsair F60, 3Gbit link selected ok). The OCZ
people I talked to said there's nothing they can do to fix whatever the issue might be,
but what I'm interested in is why it happens; if I can find that out then maybe I can
figure a workaround. I'm using LSI 1030-based PCIe cards, eg. SAS3442, SAS3800,
SAS3041, etc. I'd welcome your thoughts on the issue. Would be nice to get a Vertex4
running with a 3Gbit link in a Fuel, Tezro or Origin/Onyx.
Note I've been using the Vertex4 as a replacement for ancient 1GB SCSI disks in
Stoll/SIRIX systems used by textile manufacturers, works rather well. Despite the
low bandwidth limit of FastSCSI2 (10MB/sec), it still cut the time for a full backup
from 30 mins to just 6 mins (tens of thousands of small pattern files). Alas, with
the Vertex4 no longer available, I switched to the Crucial M550 (since it does have
proper PLP). I'd been hoping to use the V180 instead, but its lack of full PLP is an issue.
Ian.
alacard - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
In my view the performance consistency basically blows the lid off of OCZ and the reliability of their Barefoot controller. Despite reporting from most outlets, for years now drives based off of this technology have suffered massive failure rates due to sudden power loss. Here we have definitive evidence of those flaws and the lengths OCZ is going to in order to work around them (note, i didn't say 'fix' them).The fact that they were willing to go to the extra cost of adding the power loss module in addition to crippling the sustained performance of their flagship drive in order to flush the cache out of DRAM speaks VOLUMES about how bad their reliability was before. You don't go to such extreme - potentially kiss of death measures - without a good boot up your ass pushing you headlong toward them. In this case said boot was constructed purely out of OCZ's fear that releasing yet ANOTHER poorly constructed drive would finally put their reputation out of it's misery for good and kill any chance a future sales.
OCZ has cornered themselves in a no win scenario:
1) They don't bother making the drive reliable and in doing so save the cost of the power loss module and keep the sustained speed of the Vector 180 high. The drive reviews well with no craters in performance and the few customers OCZ has left buy another doomed Barefoot SSD that's practically guaranteed to brick on them within a few months. As a result they loose those customers for good along with their company.
or
2) The go to the cost of adding the power loss module and cripple the drives performance to ensure that the drive is reliable. The drive reviews horribly and no one buys it.
This is their position. Kiss of death indeed.
Ultimately, i think it speaks to how complicated controller development is and that if you don't have a huge company with millions of R&D funds at your disposal it's probably best if you don't throw your hat into that ring. It's a shame but it seems to be the way high tech works. (Global oligopoly, here we come.)
All things considered, it's nice that this is finally all out in the open.
sfc - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
Fool me once, shame on, shame on me. A fool me can't get fooled again.I *KNEW* OCZ was a garbage company after all the havoc they caused in the late 90s/early 00s with their crap memory products. It sounded alarm bells in my head that reminded me of their fake address that was literally an empty storefront.
But I read all the press, heard how it was just the same name but a different backing company. So I bought one of their SSDs like a fool, only to send it back multiple times and everytime have it die again. I still have an 80GB intel SSD I bought several years before the OCZ that's still kicking.
After all that, I find out the same crook selling crap memory was behind the "new" OCZ. Pulling his same parlor tricks giving review sites hand-picked models and sending bottom barrel reject flash to customers. You should just refuse to review any more of their hardware, they're crooks and their wares are trash.
Jahzah_1 - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
Just picked up a Samsung 850 Evo for $204 at Microcenter (price matched to Newegg), last Saturday. Don't understand the justification by OCZ to price the 480GB version at $275.Jahzah_1 - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
That is $204 for the 500GB Evo.mapesdhs - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
As I understand the intent of this product, it's aimed at the likes of the Extreme Proand 850 Pro. The Arc 100 is the mainstream competitor to the EVO, which is $196
on newegg for the 480GB.
Ian.
Jahzah_1 - Thursday, March 26, 2015 - link
oh, I see. What I didn't take into account was the fairly inexpensive nature of 3D-Nand production. So Samsung has an edge it seems, to set their mid-range drives at that price.rocketman122 - Thursday, March 26, 2015 - link
Ive had nothing but bad experience with OCZ. I had mem go bad, rma and sold them. I had the core 64 SSD that the company knew were problematic and still didnt have integrity to not sell them. that core SSD cost me quite chunk of money and I suffered with that. I never forI hope they go out of business and stop selling their gear to the public. we need companies with reliable gear.
ocztosh - Monday, March 30, 2015 - link
Hello rocketman122, thank you for your comments and sorry to hear that you had issues with the Core Series. The old company no longer exists and the IP was purchased by Toshiba. As OCZ Storage Solutions - A Toshiba Group Company we have completely redone our products and processes and there has been a great focus on quality throughout the organization. Everything from the product design cycle through manufacturing has been updated. By implementing our own in-house controller and firmware technology and having access to premium Toshiba NAND we are now able to impact this better than ever. We believe we have a very competitive offering today when it comes to reliability and product quality and hope that we will have the opportunity to prove it to you in the future. Thank you again for your previous business.loimlo - Thursday, March 26, 2015 - link
Good SSD review as usual. Kudos to Kristian's efforts.Btw, I wonder the M-I-A BX100 review. Can we expect it ?
Kristian Vättö - Friday, March 27, 2015 - link
It's coming. This month has been full of NDAs, which have postponed the BX100 review, but once I'm done with next week's NDAs the BX100 will be getting my full attention :)loimlo - Saturday, March 28, 2015 - link
Thanks for clarification. Take your time to do it ~~LB-ID - Thursday, March 26, 2015 - link
Looks like an overpriced product that doesn't stack up against competition in the same price range. Given OCZ's extensive track record of failures and attempts to use their user base as unpaid beta testers I can understand their desire to include a feature to give more peace of mind, but in reality it's just not that useful and certainly insufficient to overcome years of accumulated ill will.serndipity - Thursday, March 26, 2015 - link
The specifications say it all.On a $, performance, reliability, endurance, warranty basis, the OCZ 180 falls significantly short of even the consumer grade competition (e.g. Crucial or Samsung).
Unfortunately, the OCZ story when from deceiving investors, to customers, ending in bankruptcy.
Sadly, the same management etc., remains in place
Be smart and avoid OCZ
ocztosh - Monday, March 30, 2015 - link
Hi LB-ID, thank you for your feedback. We have shipped countless Barefoot 3 based drives across multiple series products and never once had to rev silicon. We have made updates to firmware to continually improve our products. The addition of the PFM+ feature was a decision to support customers that are really on the edge of enthusiast and workstation. This is a required feature for many enterprise drives and we felt there was a value to including this feature into our Vector 180 Series. We agree that not every customer necessarily needs this feature, and for those customers across the client spectrum we have other BF3 based drives that do not include the additional circuitry, but for those customers that really would like that extra layer of protection we were able to integrate this feature without a price premium over our previous Vector 150 Series. We have already received a very positive response from some users but will continue to offer a range of drives to meet the needs of different user applications.voicequal - Friday, March 27, 2015 - link
Wow, great review and a ton of new tests and data. The bathtub curve on the mixed sequential read/write performance will be very interesting to compare to forthcoming NVMe drives. I was surprised by how much the IOPS were reduced by commingling of sequential reads/writes. Seems to be room for improvement in this area.Ethos Evoss - Saturday, March 28, 2015 - link
The worst company of SSD's some OCZ or OWC or PVC .. jeez trash.. it's been sold to toshiba anyway ..ocztosh - Monday, March 30, 2015 - link
Hello Ethos Evoss. We are sorry that you feel this way and/or if you had a negative experience in the past. We are indeed now part of Toshiba and OCZ Storage Solutions is a very different organization as a subsidiary of Toshiba. Toshiba has provided the ability to vastly enhance resources for product development as well as given us complete access to their premium NAND. We certainly will continue to strive to meet the high expectations of you, our valued customers. Thank you again for your input.daerron - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
Nice in depth analysis Anandtech! Read the article as I'm receiving a new Vector 180 240GB drive this week as my original Vector bricked itself earlier this month after around 2 years of service. I have to say that I'm really impressed with OCZ's customer service as I couriered the drive last week and will be receiving a brand new and latest SSD in return this week. Fortunately I had my data backed up as it really just died without any warning. Based on the analysis I was also thinking this would be a killer laptop drive, till I saw the lack of slumber support which is a bit of a disappointment and opportunity missed. Still the PFM+ and low power usage is also most welcome in my workstation PC. We have regular power cuts in my country so its great to have that extra peace of mind.bogdan_kr - Thursday, December 17, 2015 - link
Hello guys. I would like to ask how exactly this Storage Bench - Light is designed. The description says it is designed to be an accurate illustration of basic usage with Total IO Operations 832,339, Total GB Read 17.97 and Total GB Written 23.25.With its 23 GB of writes it should account for roughly two or three days of average usage (i.e. 7-11GB per day).
How long (typically) does it take to finish this bench?
Is it designed to last for few hours (which would account for a typical daily use) or is it designed to finish as fast as possible, in few minutes perhaps?
bogdan_kr - Saturday, January 23, 2016 - link
I am aware that most likely it is a rhetorical question but can anyone from AnandTech answer it, please? I just wanted to be sure about that benchmark.