Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy • Hacker News Board

Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy

#11

Post by srdev » Wed, Nov 27, 2013, 11:30 PM UTC

uptown wrote: post #10

jkbyc wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure it's so bad. I bought my OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 2.5 years ago, it's been great and I'm still happy with it. They also have had many good reviews.

Same here. Swapped out the stock drive in my MPB with a Vertex 3 in April 2011, and its been rock solid ever since with everyday-use.

I'll provide a dissenting data point. After going through 5 RMA's with Vertex 2 drives, I finally convinced them to just upgrade me to a Vertex 3, due to reports of better reliability. The Vertex 3 failed within a week. Considered the drive a lost cause, swapped in a Crucial M4 -- been rock solid ever since.

Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy

#12

Post by fletchowns » Wed, Nov 27, 2013, 11:33 PM UTC

jkbyc wrote: post #7

Mithaldu wrote: post #6

> Once-great They were never great. They lied to their customers by selling hardware under the same name as previously produced hardware with cheaper components and lesser specs. They built hardware that was simply off-spec, an example being drives where the connectors were an entire millimeter shifted, such that when installed in certain machines the connectors literally could not make contact with the corresponding…

I'm not sure it's so bad. I bought my OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 2.5 years ago, it's been great and I'm still happy with it. They also have had many good reviews.

No, it is so bad. OCZ was a terrible company and nobody is going to miss them.

Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy

#13

Post by fletchowns » Wed, Nov 27, 2013, 11:35 PM UTC

highace wrote: post #5

I wasn't aware of it before reading into this whole story, but OCZ seemed to have quite a problem with QA. My vertex 2 barely lasted a year before it started going funny, which I put down to bad luck. But now it seems I wasn't the only one.

They are notorious for pushing out low quality products. You really should be a more informed consumer before you buy stuff, it's not like it takes a long time to research this kind of stuff.

Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy

#14

Post by nickff » Wed, Nov 27, 2013, 11:42 PM UTC

srdev wrote: post #11

uptown wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. Swapped out the stock drive in my MPB with a Vertex 3 in April 2011, and its been rock solid ever since with everyday-use.

I'll provide a dissenting data point. After going through 5 RMA's with Vertex 2 drives, I finally convinced them to just upgrade me to a Vertex 3, due to reports of better reliability. The Vertex 3 failed within a week. Considered the drive a lost cause, swapped in a Crucial M4 -- been rock solid ever since.

I had a similar experience with the Vertex 2, and switched to Intel 320 and subsequently Samsung 840 Pro. Intel and Samsung drives have done a great job, while I had 3 Vertex 2 failures.

Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy

#15

Post by bryne » Wed, Nov 27, 2013, 11:46 PM UTC

uptown wrote: post #10

jkbyc wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure it's so bad. I bought my OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 2.5 years ago, it's been great and I'm still happy with it. They also have had many good reviews.

Same here. Swapped out the stock drive in my MPB with a Vertex 3 in April 2011, and its been rock solid ever since with everyday-use.

Everyone on HN is glad you're happy, but your single data point does fly in the face of statistically significant reliability problems with OCZ drives (ie, the only real way to evaluate storage manufacturers).

Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy

#16

Post by scott_karana » Wed, Nov 27, 2013, 11:55 PM UTC

bryne wrote: post #15

uptown wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. Swapped out the stock drive in my MPB with a Vertex 3 in April 2011, and its been rock solid ever since with everyday-use.

Everyone on HN is glad you're happy, but your single data point does fly in the face of statistically significant reliability problems with OCZ drives (ie, the only real way to evaluate storage manufacturers).

Do you have actual statistics? I'd truly like to see them.

Most of the reliability problems I've seen have been self-reported, so I'm not sure what biases are present in what I've seen. ;)

(I agree that many of their practices were bad, which likely lent to bad drives! This isn't trolling, just genuine curiosity if there were published stats)

Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy

#17

Post by kalleboo » Wed, Nov 27, 2013, 11:56 PM UTC

In the early SSD days, I only heard two adjectives to describe OCZ drives - "fastest" and "unstable". It was inevitable the latter would catch up to them.

Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy

#18

Post by gogeek » Thu, Nov 28, 2013, 12:02 AM UTC

We had about 40 OCZ drives (Vertex 2/3/3 Max IOPS) and 6 of them failed. Our 8 Vertex 3 Max IOPS were in RAID 5 for a huge calculations which didn't require reliability but wrote a lot of data and therfore we tried to save time with this experimental RAID. The RAID was fine for about a couple of month and seeing almost 3 GB/s throughput was mindblowing. But suddenly we we saw drives randomly failing. But the drives did not completly fail, we were able to rebuild the RAID with the same hard drive. We did that a couple of times until we thought it was too much hassle and used the drives somewhere else. Now we are buying Crucial M4s and they are totally fine. In the first place a hard drive must be reliable.

Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy

#19

Post by AmVess » Thu, Nov 28, 2013, 12:05 AM UTC

mrbill wrote: post #9

Not surprised, their installation instructions should have had "update firmware" as a step...

The first three steps were 1)hold breath 2)cross fingers 3)pray.

Always not a good thing when dealing with such a vital system component.

I hated flashing the things, since there was always a real possibility of turning them into lightweight plastic bricks, and often the firmware was needed to fix show-stopping bugs. so flashing wasn't optional.

Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy

#20

Post by gcb1 » Thu, Nov 28, 2013, 12:05 AM UTC

uptown wrote: post #10

jkbyc wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure it's so bad. I bought my OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 2.5 years ago, it's been great and I'm still happy with it. They also have had many good reviews.

Same here. Swapped out the stock drive in my MPB with a Vertex 3 in April 2011, and its been rock solid ever since with everyday-use.

please, unless you compared their offering with other ssds or used their support forums, this comment is as empty as it can be.

ssds are better than spinning media, so what? even the worst one would make you happy. this is not the point. they constantly send one device to reviewers and then put lesser specs on the shelfs, or less immorally, just updated the revision silently to cut costs. i have a couple of them. i regret buying because what i got was something equivalent to something i could have gotten cheaper. also, admins often mocked people on the support forums.