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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

#81

Post by ChikkaChiChi »

jrs235 wrote: post #80
jwr wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. T…

Sounds like what Packard Bell computers did. They were inexpensive. And if you bought two of the same model and opened them up you'd see different components. Different modems, ram, etc.

The problem here though is that they were shipping off their spicier models to review, while the shrink wrapped version you would buy was off-spec.

Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy

#82

Post by Mithaldu »

parasubvert wrote: post #77
fletchowns wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

My Vertex 4s are doing well after 18 months and my crucial m4s died within 6 (power system failures). I'll miss ocz.

Crucial is only marginally better than OCZ in terms of reliability. You got lucky. If you care about drives surviving, buy Intel or Samsung:

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/911-7/ssd.html

Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy

#83

Post by rz2k »

ek wrote: post #48
kabdib wrote: post #28

In the "hardware junkies" mailing list at work (Microsoft) the OCZ drives were a periodic source of derision. "My OCZ drive failed..." / "I'm on my fourth RMA, what should I do?" "Real junkies buy Intel." (Or Samsung). And they don't buy TLC flash, either.

I am pleased that Microsoft has a list called "hardware junkies" :). I'd definitely be on it if I were there. Nice to know they agree with the rest of us that Samsung is the way to go nowadays, too.

The newest model is TLC, but it is likely that they figured out a way to make it last long enough for average consumers.

Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy

#84

Post by _pmf_ »

jrs235 wrote: post #80
jwr wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. T…

Sounds like what Packard Bell computers did. They were inexpensive. And if you bought two of the same model and opened them up you'd see different components. Different modems, ram, etc.

Apple does the same with its display manufacturers.

Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy

#85

Post by alanctgardner2 »

josteink wrote: post #66
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…

> 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 did…

> What they didn't say on the package WITH CAPITAL LETTERS was that it was a RAID0/JBOD of SSDs with zero redundancy

This really shouldn't matter to the consumer - there are lots of ways to couple components in a black box to increase the rate of failure. They don't disclose to you how the controller is built, or how they go about marking bad blocks, so why would they say in bold letters that under the covers they're striping across two disks?

Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy

#87

Post by eDavis698 »

lmz wrote: post #63
eDavis698 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Thanks for the clarification, my memory was off. Link to Intel/Micron site: http://imflash.com/

Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy

#88

Post by AshleysBrain »

jwr wrote: post #70
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…

> 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. T…

Their drives were better than Crucial. I had a Crucial SSD that due to a firmware bug became unusably slow (far slower than a mechanical drive) after a couple of months. They released a firmware update that supposedly fixed it (which also required tweaking BIOS settings and booting in to a weird minimal version of Windows 95 - in 2013...), but it only made it slightly better, still a totally useless drive. I'd take an OCZ drive any day - been using one in my main dev desktop for a while now and it's kept up just fine.

Surprised it's not Crucial going under after that experience.

Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy

#90

Post by oahziur »

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…

"They built drives with extreme speeds while entirely sacrificing longevity and reliability." This is so true, I had their SSD before, and it broken ==> I lost most of my data in that drive...
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