OCZ SSDs

godskitchen

I have been using OCZ SSD's in desktop builds (I use Intel drives in Servers) for a few years now, starting with Agility 2s. I have moved on to Agility 3s and now agility 4s.

I guess I have used around 100+ drives in this time. I have only ever had one drive fail, an Agility 2.................. up until recently!

I have had two Agility 4s fail within a week, in different locations and with different hardware spec......

Has anyone else experienced this? Have OCZ gone to crap?

amallon

I have two OCZ petrol SSDs in use for about 1 year now. 1 of them failed and was replaced under warranty. I have read other forums were people were giving off about the quality of OCZ drives.

eth0

I have an agility 3 and it's been going grand. never seen a SSD fail yet. Were you torturing it in any way, shape or form?

ktulu123

I've had two OCZ Vertex 3 drives running in RAID for the past 6 months and i've experienced no problems

lynch.ie

The Agility 4 is possbily built in a different factory. :mad:

godskitchen

eth0 wrote: »

I have an agility 3 and it's been going grand. never seen a SSD fail yet. Were you torturing it in any way, shape or form?

Not in the slightest, they were both used in offices. Nothing more intensive than MS Word and Google Chrome......

I think I might move to Intel SSDs.

joujoujou

Heard of frequent failures of SSDs equipped with SandForce SF-2281 controller, but AFAIK vertex4 is on Indilinx?

Strange anyway.

godskitchen wrote: »

[...]

I think I might move to Intel SSDs.

Bear in mind Samsung as well.

830 series have quite good performance.

deconduo

OCZ SSDs have the highest fail rate of all the major brands, one of the reasons why they are usually cheaper spec for spec. Here are the RMA rates from a french hardware site for October this year:

OCZ: 5.02%
Crucial: 1.11%
Corsair: 1.05%
Samsung: 0.48%
Intel: 0.45%

Fluffy88

That would be a good idea,
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=670592

That's a little bit out of date but it shows a clear picture. You must have been very lucky with your OCZ SSDs as there was huge problems with it SSDs firmware particularly the 3 series that caused a huge amount of their drives to fail.

The one other brand not in that article is Samsung and their drives would be up beside Intel for reliability. Until recently Samsung mostly only made SSDs for OEM machines for people like Dell and only recently enough joined the consumer market. The Samsung 830 SSD is top quality.

joujoujou

deconduo wrote: »

[...] Here are the RMA rates from a french hardware site for October this year:

OCZ: 5.02%
Crucial: 1.11%
Corsair: 1.05%
Samsung: 0.48%
Intel: 0.45%

Interesting. Will you please provide a link to it?

Edit: Never mind. Found it: http://www.hardware.fr/articles/881-7/ssd.html

Beez

We first starting using OCZ drives here at work and things were ok for a while, after about a year they would start seriously slowing down majorly and very weird errors you could not put your finger on. These were mainly the OCZ core 2 drives. Then loads of them then started dieing. Since then we have replaced them all with intel and have not looked back. We stopped even bothering RMA'ing them. I would not touch them with a barge pole now, they may have gotten better but they have caused serious headaches troublshooting.

Alun

I've got a Vertex 2 that's been in constant use for nearly 2.5 years now with no problems and no degradation in performance. Chances are though if I had to buy a new one it'd be a Samsung.

Monotype

I'm not sure that OCZ were ever top quality. They have been hugely popular though. Price cuts fed further popularity and allowed them to gain large market shares. I wouldn't call them as outright bad now as they offered much the same product as other manufacturers. How they handled some of their affairs would have me cautious trusting them.

I think if you were spending your money - or someone's money - on 100 SSDs, you should be continuously researching and monitoring each product. Sometimes a company -any company- can have a few duds. Often companies will change manufacturer.

Samsung 830s have been great, for example, but I would be careful in buying an 840 before we see how they last, as it's such new technology.

I have three OCZ SSDs, two Vertex 2s and an Agility 3. One of the Vertex 2s was DOA and was replaced with another, which has been mostly fine (*). The second I got for nothing as it was randomly dropping out, a secure erase and firmware update were enough to correct it though. The Agility 3 has been fine.

* - the Vertex 2s seem to have real problems coming out of sleep. I have to make sure my laptop never sleeps, otherwise it wakes to a STOP 0x000000F4 error.

So yeah... iffy at best.

Tea_Bag

I've had 2 petrol SSDs and both of them died. got a refund the second time and switched to Samsung. haven't looked back.

theteal

there was a bargain alert for the 120gb ocz vertex plus @ ~£40 a couple of months ago so out of curiosity we picked up 5 of them. i upgraded the fw on all 5 upon receipt. for the most part they've been ok but 1 has failed completely (it's sitting in front of me now to be sent back on Monday). . .typically this being the only one we actually put in a client machine

needless to say we'll be sticking to m4's in future

godskitchen

Monotype wrote: »

I think if you were spending your money - or someone's money - on 100 SSDs, you should be continuously researching and monitoring each product. Sometimes a company -any company- can have a few duds. Often companies will change manufacturer.

Which is what I do. I only use OCZ drives on client mechines where an image of the drive is taken daily. One PC going to ground for a few hours is no big deal in the grand scheme.

As I said, I use Intel drives for Servers, server goes down and I get 100 calls about email not working.

Beez

godskitchen wrote: »

Which is what I do. I only use OCZ drives on client mechines where an image of the drive is taken daily. One PC going to ground for a few hours is no big deal in the grand scheme.

As I said, I use Intel drives for Servers, server goes down and I get 100 calls about email not working.

But surely time is money and you are better off spending the extra € on a better more reliable drive than wasting time recovering from images using sh1tty OCZ SSD's.