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Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy

arstechnica.com

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Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy

#62
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.

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

Either explain why or save your breath :|

Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy

#63
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I bought my SSD, I narrowed in on Intel very quickly. I don't trust "gamer" / benchmark-focused brands at all for this kind of product.

Definately, Intel fabs their own NAND devices in the USA! The 320/520 also has Intel's own controller in it. I have a 320 & a 330 striped in my laptop (SATA II). The have been working flawlessly for over a year, nearly two for the 320. After my issues with Western Digital, Asus, OCZ (power supplies) and EVGA (mobo/gfx) I will never trust "gaming" hardware again. Overpriced junk. [OTOH all my Intel, MSI, and AMD hardw…

The 520 is SandForce[1], not Intel's own controller. It looks like Intel has given up on using their own controllers for their consumer SSDs, given that the 330 is also SandForce. Their own next generation controller is in their DC series SSDs marketed towards enterprise & datacenter usage.

[1]: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5508/intel-ssd-520-review-cher...

Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy

#64
post #40

I have OCZ drives in a couple of my machines, all of which are at least a year old. I'd heard bad things about OCZ, but I didn't realize their reputation was that shot. I'm wondering if I should replace my drives, or if the bathtub curve is in full effect here and I've dodged a bullet... With regards to other brands, I spent some time at the startup where I used to work putting together manufacturing PCs meant for pr…

Depends on the model of the SSD.

Personally, I have had 3 different Revodrives, all of which have failed. The last one I sent in, and asked to get a more reliable disk back, and I got a Vector. So far so good. Keep away from Revodrives.

Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy

#66
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…

> They built drives with extreme speeds while entirely sacrificing longevity and reliability.

You don't say. One example being the OCZ RevoDrives.

Our company investigated replacing our traditional HDDs with SSDs and with RevoDrives to see how that impacted our build-times and development efficiency.

Almost every second user who received a RevoDrive experienced critical data-failures and 100% data-loss.

What they didn't say on the package WITH CAPITAL LETTERS was that it was a RAID0/JBOD of SSDs with zero redundancy. If one drive failed (and they did) you lost all your data with no means of recovery.

We could have asked for replacement units because they were still under warranty (some as new as 2 months), but needless to say, we weren't very eager on more drives from OCZ.

If the rest of their product line-up was like this, I can't say I'm too surprised about them not making it for the long run.

Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy

#67
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enjoy: http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=2&h... http://www.hardware.fr/articles/911-7/ssd.html

And from 2012: http://www.behardware.com/articles/862-6/components-returns-... - Crucial 0.82% (as against 0.8%) - Intel 1.73% (as against 0.1%) - Corsair 2.93% (as against 2.9%) - OCZ 7.03% (as against 4.2%) Crucial has taken top spot from Intel thanks to a notable increase in Intel’s returns rate. We should say that this time, the Intel sample is only just above the minimum required and that some of the Intel retur…

Wow thanks for the data! In 10 years of interest in acquiring data in hardware return stats, this is the first time I come across such a source.

"The first question is of course where the stats come from. They’re taken from a large French etailer, whose database we have had direct access to. We were therefore able to extract the stats we wanted directly from source."

Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy

#68
post #18

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 d…

We had to replace 50+ Agility 128s as around half of them went bad within weeks of install.

A year later and none of the replacement Intels have gone bad...

Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy

#69
post #41

I have avoided them since I started buying SSDs because I associate their brand with Sandforce controllers, and I associate Sandforce controllers with drive failure. Whether these associations are informed by and backed by data or not, they are among the points that steered me into the arms of Intel and Samsung for my SSD needs.

Intel's consumer SSDs use Sandforce controllers. However, Intel seems to have a more thorough QA team than the other companies. They made a lot of changes to the SF-2281 firmware before they accepted it for their drives. And then after it shipped, they discovered an AES-256 bug that every other manufacturer missed for over a year.

Almost unrelated but every SSDs with the old SF-1200 (such as Corsair F60) are not compatible with the current Intel Haswell platform. The drive randomly disappears from the system and this on ALL motherboards.

Google "sandforce 1200 haswell"

Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy

#70
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…

> They lied to their customers by selling hardware under the same name as previously produced hardware with cheaper components and lesser specs

I was hoping someone would bring this up. When shopping around for SSD drives a year or so ago, I stumbled upon stories about this and simply couldn't believe that a company would do something like that.

Basically, you'd read some reviews (with benchmarks) about OCZ drives. Then you would go and purchase the exact specific type that the reviewer had — and the hardware inside would be different (inferior). There was no way to check this without opening the drive up or measuring with benchmarks.

This was the moment I decided I would never buy anything from OCZ, as I can't do business with a company that lies to me. I am glad they are going away.

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