SSD Manufacturer OCZ Preparing For Bankruptcy 182
JDG1980 writes "OCZ, a manufacturer of solid-state drives, says it will file for bankruptcy. This move is being forced by Hercules Technology Growth Capital, which had lent $30 million to OCZ under terms that were later breached. The most likely outcome of this bankruptcy is that OCZ's assets (including the Indilinx controller IP) will be purchased by Toshiba. If this deal falls through, the company will be liquidated. No word yet on what a Toshiba purchase would mean in terms of warranty support for OCZ's notoriously unreliable drives."
...and (Score:5, Insightful)
...and not a single customer was surprised.
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I actually kinda am, I purchased one of their drives over a year ago and I have had no reason to complain about it. But that was just one drive, if there was news about issues, I missed it somehow.
Re:...and (Score:4, Interesting)
They had loads of issues with their early drives for a few years.
They got rid of the CEO, and changed their approach to quality, but it was too late. Their Vector drives are pretty decent, but they had no one to buy them.
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Obviously I missed all that. I must have been lucky, I have a vertex 3.
Re: ...and (Score:2)
I'm very surprised at this or perceived quality control issues.
Re: ...and (Score:5, Interesting)
European retailers publish their return rates by brand, OCZ has consistently been #1 by a wide margin, sometimes having as high as one in five (that's 20% for those of you following along at home) return rates for some models, the brand as a whole has been at around 8% for almost two years now. They're ticking time bombs. By contrast, intel, samsung et all generally have a return rate around 2% which is standard for retail items in general. Something is obviously very wrong. Also you should note that OEMs do not touch OCZ products with a 20 ft pole, you can only buy them at retail which should be a huge red flag.
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It was because they were cheap. Very cheap. Unfortunately they were also very unreliable, and if there's one thing that people do not forgive, it's losing their data.
As a result, it's a pretty terrible idea to be the maker of cheap, unreliable storage.
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I bought for cheap and fast. from discount.
2 years daily use.. still works. so dunno.
better than seagate anyways!
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That was the big problem - the high failure rates. OCZ drives consistently were amongst the fastest drives, but any rational person would see that the numbers are so big they're meaningless. I mean, if you had to choose an OCZ drive with 500MB/sec reads and writes, or a more reliable one with 400MB/sec read and write, well, what 20% loss in spe
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There are three industry standards of ssd failures:
one is samsung drives, >33% of the market and hardly any failures
second one is the rest except Sandforce users
third one is Sandforce and all OCZ drives.
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Re:...and (Score:4, Informative)
Intel are high-midrange (in terms of quality and performance) in both enterprise and desktop flash storage. Samsung has a very strong presence across the board due to reputation, very good performance (substantially better than Intel in production gear) and many of the vendor-branded enterprise drives (HP, NetApp, EMC, etc) have Samsung internals.
When I bought my current desktop's SSD (Samsung 840 Pro), the only other vendor with a drive even remotely close in performance was OCZ. Googling for "OCZ Vertex4 problems" quickly put that possibility to rest. At the time, Intel wasn't looking like they were bothering to keep up with performance on the desktop, but they're always been reasonable quality-wise.
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Re:...and (Score:4, Informative)
For example, Sandforce's engineers came up with an ugly, performance-killing hack that allowed the drive to avoid corruption if it were powered-down mid-write so they could officially claim that the ultracapacitor (*) was "optional" in "cost-sensitive applications". OCZ built drives without the ultracap, then had Sandforce furnish them with firmware that DISABLED THAT SAFETY MEASURE to avoid killing their drives' write performance in benchmarks.
To be blunt, Sandforce probably deserve to be tarred with the OCZ brush since they were actively complicit in that, but the fact remains that the problem here was caused by overriding the safety measures built into the controller rather than the controller itself...?
That said, the association has still put me off buying any Sandforce-based SSD.
(*) Which I assume was intended to provide enough power to complete the write normally. I'm also assuming that this "ultracapacitor" must be significantly more expensive than the bog standard types we're familiar with, whose cost would be negligible.
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Intel uses Sandforce controllers in most of their current consumer SSDs. The 520, 330, 335, 525, 530, and 1500 are all Sandforce drives, with the 335 being Intel's current "mainstream" drive. Apple also uses Sandforce controllers in their Macbook product line, although they dual-source with a Samsung controller I believe. From all indications, neither Intel nor Apple have seen SSD failure rates higher than average. This tells me that most of the bad rep Sandforce got was purely because of OCZ's stupid antic
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In reference to the "ugly hack", you'll likely find ugly hacks in any SSD controller.
True, but although the poster clearly had disdain for it (*), the "ugly hack" wasn't the target of his criticism per se.
What he *was* criticising was the fact that OCZ (with Sandforce's collusion) wanted to cheap out and not use the cap, but weren't prepared to accept the performance hit required to use it reliably under those circumstances, so blatantly ignored reliability to get performance on the cheap.
In other words, they had the old choice of "fast, cheap, reliable- pick any two", did so, and ended
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Their problem was that they tried to engineer their own SSDs and become a major player. Before when they were just doing RAM they basically bought the chips from someone else, copy/pasted the reference DIMM design and stuck their own heatsink on it.
Their early SSDs had a lot of firmware issues, and they handled them badly. They also did douchbag things like reducing the capacity of existing products without any indication or model number change when they figured out that they hadn't left enough spare space
Re:...and (Score:5, Insightful)
Note to self: Don't buy any new Toshiba-manufactured SSDs...
Don't worry (Score:2)
Re:Don't worry (Score:4, Funny)
and some of the staff
Relevant Dilbert strip. [dilbert.com]
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...and not a single customer was surprised.
Yes, everyone is assuming that OCZ went under because their drives were rubbish. I'd say that was the most likely cause too, but it's still (a) an assumption and (b) won't be the reason they went under in itself. No-one so far has actually answered that question!
What I mean is that companies don't go bankrupt because they sell rubbish- they go bankrupt because of the *financial consequences* of selling rubbish. (*) In particular, I'd like to know...
(i) Was OCZ's bankruptcy due to losses caused by a ver
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Better hope that it keeps doing that, chances are that your ability to exchange it under warranty may go up in smoke.
statistics prove your claim wrong (Score:2)
Numbers for the latest generations have not been conclusive yet, since a lot of those are still in warranty and they could go up
Re:...and (Score:4, Informative)
Fuck you. My OCZ Vertex 4 works like a dream.
Was that the type of dream where you're in an exam and someone comes in and steals your pencils and you chase him down the corridor, but the corridor is the one from the office where you had your first job except that when you leave at one end you realised you've re-entered at the other side and there's no exit and the person who stole your pencils is now chasing *you* and you run and run and run, then you realise that the person chasing you looks like Guy Pearce when he used to play Mike in Neighbours and by waving your hands you get your pencils back, but you only have 15 minutes of the two hour exam left and it's for Portuguese Literature which you never studied in your life and also your OCZ SSD drive keeps failing and corrupting your data?
Yeah, I guess one could say it works like a dream. (^_^)
Warranties (Score:5, Funny)
>> No word yet on what a Toshiba purchase would mean in terms of warranty support for OCZ's notoriously unreliable drives
You can expect the same level of warranty service that you've always received from OCZ.
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You can expect the same level of warranty service that you've always received from OCZ.
Yes, that is a stupid supposition for the summary to make.
The warranty is a legal obligation, and one a company would have a responsibility to fulfill, and if the company is bought by someone else, it becomes their obligation.
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I think the question was about Toshiba handling the warranties. If Toshiba buys them, they will need to honor the warranties. OTOH, if they just purchase IP they will not need to do so.
Re:Warranties (Score:4, Informative)
Sure, if you wanna face an arbitration panel hand-picked from corporate lawyers.
Anyway, it doesn't say the drives will be purchased by Toshiba, just the controller technology.
When a company goes bankrupt and another company picks its bones, the first thing to go by the wayside are things like pensions, guarantees, municipal contracts and similar agreements. Toshiba's lawyers will get them out of those warranties faster than a drunk sophomore gets out of a prom dress.
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You might think so, but it sure didn't work for fujitsu now did it? Warranty coverage and "who picks it up" varies by where you live, in Canada, I got cold hard cash for every drive I sent back to them as they failed.
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That's because you live in a relatively civilized country where people still matter.
Re:Warranties (Score:4, Interesting)
Speaking of Toshiba and Canada... I live in Canada, and bought a Toshiba laptop in America after being assured by Toshiba (I called them) that the warranty was international and that I should have no problems at all getting it serviced if there was a problem. The text of the warranty also said as much. The only caveat, they said, was that I'd have to pay the shipping costs out of my own pocket, which was expected.
Fast forward a year and a half, and my laptop needs service. I call up Toshiba Canada, and not surprisingly they won't touch the thing because of where it was purchased. So then I call up Toshiba USA, and... they tell me their repair depot will refuse any packages shipped from outside the US. In fact, Toshiba tells me to find an American friend to ship it to and then have them ship it to Toshiba...
Needless to say, my replacement laptop was not a Toshiba.
Re:Warranties (Score:5, Informative)
As soon as I read the headline (Score:3)
those expanded warranties they introduced to compete with Samsung came to mind. I wonder if they were being sincerely offered in the first place, or if they were just a gamble against what time they had left.
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Most likely a sincere do-or-die attempt, they probably hoped for enough sales through that to turn things around. Whether that hope was realistic or they were just grasping at straws I don't know, either way the attempt was free and a slim chance to save the company beats doing nothing and going bankrupt for sure, at least from OCZ's perspective. They might have burned a lot more customers that way, but it reminds me a little of an "Ask Slashdot" about a small CEO/investor introducing hellish work hours and
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I assume you are talking about the US. In the EU your warranty is with the vendor and is for a minimum of two years. If the drive fails the shop you bought it from must handle the warranty, even if the manufacturer is long gone. You can choose to directly to the manufacturer if you like and they allow it.
In my experience with storage devices if either the shop or manufacturer goes out of business the other one will usually honour the warranty. I had an Intel SSD from a shop that vanished and Intel replaced
Re:Warranties (Score:5, Informative)
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Unless Toshiba actually agrees to assume the liabilities of OCZ (and WHY would they do that?)
Only one reason comes to mind - in order to preserve OCZ brand name. This brand is still associated with crazy fast drives. People in the industry know this is due to OCZ blatantly lying to customers and advertising compressed data speed, but perception of unwashed masses remains.
Of course OCZ is also associated woth total lack of RMA support, and most people that had to go thru RMA never bought OCZ again.
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They'll just spin off and sell off anything of value and leave an empty shell to go bankrupt.
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Only if they bought the company whole. If the company goes bankrupt and Toshiba buys "substantially all the assets of" the company, they may not get the obligations.
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Unless they don't buy that part of the business.
The whole point of a bankruptcy is to get rid of excess obligations.
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They likely will buy some assets from the liquidation, but not others. As a result, they likely won't be bound by warranty agreements.
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The warranty is a legal obligation, and one a company would have a responsibility to fulfill, and if the company is bought by someone else, it becomes their obligation.
It depends on how the company was bought. Once it hits the bankruptcy court everything is up to grabs, and warranty coverage is a debt. Generally a company that buys it 'stock and barrel' will end up honoring the warranties, but it's not a guarantee.
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That would be nice. However, if the sale is structured as a partial asset acquisition, rather than a sale of the whole company as an entity, it may or may not be true. The details are brutally complex and varied; but it cannot be safely assumed that a few tedious 'obligations' (especially to a class of very small claimants, who are unlik
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Let's be honest here, OCZ customer service could never have been as bad as Toshiba.
I have never had a Toshiba warranty/customer service problem and all of my home computers have been Toshiba since the early 1990s. Even my first one, a used T-1100, they sent me a still shrink-wrapped fresh DOS copy when I needed it. My only gripes have been with places where I bought one, not with the manufacturer.
Re:Warranties (Score:4, Interesting)
No problems with warranty service on our Toshiba CT scanners.
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Let's be honest here, OCZ customer service could never have been as bad as Toshiba.
My experience has been that Toshiba makes total shit computers (in terms of reliability, durability, service life, and driver support); but their SSD business does a lot of OEM work for just about anybody selling computers with SSDs inside. The sort of buyers who get really, really, really, touchy if a given component supplier ends up being responsible for a lot of warranty incidents. If they are doing that successfully, they can probably handle 'boring, but reliable' at any rate.
STILL not accurate and STILL misquoted (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, I hate them because they decided to "stop being competitive" and single handedly drove up the price of SSDs basically by price fixing. Their drives went up 50% in price overnight. That was such bullshit, they deserve bankruptcy.
Re:STILL not accurate and STILL misquoted (Score:5, Insightful)
I built over 50 computers with OCZ SSDs and about 40 of them had to be flashed to the latest firmware before they operated correctly.
In some parts of the universe, we call not working correctly 80% of the time 'unreliable'.
Even if it's fixed, that kind of reputation hangs around for a long time.
Re:STILL not accurate and STILL misquoted (Score:5, Informative)
But they're not incorrectly working 80% of the time, they're incorrectly working once, fixed, and then they work for the rest of the products life.
Re:STILL not accurate and STILL misquoted (Score:5, Insightful)
But they're not incorrectly working 80% of the time, they're incorrectly working once, fixed, and then they work for the rest of the products life.
So they magically fix themselves?
If I buy something, I want it to work out of the box. If it didn't work out of the box 80% of the time, I'd call it 'unreliable'. I wouldn't care whether I can download some program from the Internet to fix it, you'd already have lost me as a customer.
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By which standard, Windows is almost 100% unreliable. No wonder I hate on it.
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Re:STILL not accurate and STILL misquoted (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't understand how some one like you would want to build a computer. Your complaints would put legos or megablocks out of business.
I've built four computers for my own use in the last four years. They all worked out of the box, and are all still working.
Why shouldn't I expect a new computer built from new parts to just work?
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In any computer part, a failure rate that causes catastrophic data loss with 1/5 chance is unacceptable.
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That might just be acceptable if you had a second PC that it happened to work fine with to do the update on, and of course know that the update exists. If you don't...
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And I built 1 system with an OCZ Petrol and it vaporized the partitions 6 months later, so that's 100%. I think luck had more to do with success than anything.
I actually _was_ surprised to get a replacement Vertex 4 fairly quickly, which reminds me I should open it and flash it while the firmwares are still easy to get.
Re:STILL not accurate and STILL misquoted (Score:5, Interesting)
I must have gotten some of the messed up drives you were supposed to. I bought 3 OCZ SSDs. All three different sizes, each purchased a few weeks apart. Within a year, and fairly close in time, all three died. Died as in DEAD, with no warning or indications of a problem. Not recognized by BIOS, not flashable, one smelled like burnt electronics, DEAD. OCZ happily replaced all of them. But I figured...this is either an unlikely coincidence or their drives suck. Rather than figure out the answer to that, I bought Crucial and Intel SSDs and all have been running for more than twice as long as the OCZ SSDs with no issues.
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How many studies do you need to do to prove that gunshots to the head are often fatal?
Just keep insisting on higher standards of statistical rigor until you run out of test subjects who you dislike. Simple enough.
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So this is a lie then?
http://www.behardware.com/articles/881-7/components-returns-rates-7.html [behardware.com]
Re:STILL not accurate and STILL misquoted (Score:5, Informative)
Re:STILL not accurate and STILL misquoted (Score:5, Informative)
I disagree. I've had several friends(at least 4 off the top of my head) that have bought OCZs. None of them lasted 6 months without having to do an RMA. One friend had 3 RMAs in about 9 months. Despite having 3 months left on his warranty he went with Intel(because of my recommendation) because it wasn't worth his time to continually have to restore from backup to a temporary drive while he does the RMA.
Even in forums I hear people talk about failed OCZ drives regularly. Sure, there's the occasional Samsung and Intel in there. But OCZ sure is mentioned FAR more frequently than the other brands. I'm not convinced that their market share is 90% to offset the number of users that complain about failed disks.
Personally, I don't care if they used 1-million write cycle flash memory instead of Kingston's 3000 cycle memory. If every drive I've had second hand experience with has to be RMAd in less than 6 months something is horribly wrong and I'd be avoiding that product or brand. There's alot more to a drive than just the number of write cycles. Poorly written SSD firmware could easily make a drive with a very long lifespan be abnormally short due to write amplification. So feel free to keep talking numbers, cause the comparision of write cycles is only a very small part of what makes an SSD reliable(or not).
In my opinion OCZ has undoubtedly made some bad models. Are they all bad? Probably not. But, it doesn't take much to earn a reputation for being crappy. And once you've earned that reputation it's going to take some serious convincing to get people to spend money on your product again. In my case, they'd have to give me a drive for free to prove that they really are just as reliable as the 3 Intel drives I've had in my 3 main machines that haven't failed in 3 years+ of use.
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I think you are missing the bigger picture.
Regardless of how well or how poorly an item sells, regardless of a company's reputation, and regardless of what you and I "think" about their product, if significant quantities of their product is being RMAed that is going to kill the profits of that product. If its a very high failure rate it might bankrupt the company. OCZ has some products that have been claimed to have a 40% return rate during the warranty period. Oh look, OCZ is filing for bankruptcy. Coi
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That was because the morons at OCZ released them with beta level firmware that made the first batch of 3 and 4 series drives not be recognized 100% of the time by many BIOSes.
A few years ago when SSDs were brand new, the constant firmware updating required of these drives was common enough that I remember it.
It is why I paid a premium for my first SSD, an Intel X25-G2 160GB drive that was $550 at the time (ouch, those were the days).
Still works perfectly, in a daily use machine, with 97% life left. It will be thrown out from being too small long before it fails.
While all SSD companies have had their teething problems, OCZ has had more of them, and that rep sticks around,
Is this the same OCZ that sells memory? (Score:3)
Just wondering if it's the same company. Their memory sticks work fine, but that's a minimally profitable market with a glut of providers nowadays.
Re:Is this the same OCZ that sells memory? (Score:5, Insightful)
They used to sell memory, but the margins could support their high rate of rma replacements, so they gave up.
I'm surprised they never turned around their rather cavalier approach to QA since it cost them a lot of money for years and years.
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The only Memory stick I ever bought that was bad right out of the box was OCZ.
YMMV.
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Must not buy much memory. I've had Kingston, Corsair, Crucial, Muskin, Patriot and G.Skill all DOA out of the box before. Last bad stick was a G.Skill eco, though they're my favorite brand especially their low voltage memory.
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Mine wasn't completely DOA, it was "it failed Windows RAM diagnostic". I have a habit of running it on all my machines.
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How many? (Score:5, Informative)
I use Intel SSDs, period. I'm not a fan of Intel at all and really want AMD to succeed such that we have some compititon in the marketplace. But when it comes to SSDs Intel holds the best non-failure rate that I've found.
I've paid more but on my own personal rigs as well as every client's, I've not had any failure. And they are fast too. I mean duh, they are SSDs!
But whenever I saw OCZ I saw marketing. I mean I guess they had some good drives using reliable chips and good controllers but from what I saw it was all about the marketing. Which leads me to my post's question. How many engineers did they really have at that company that worked on things vs the amount of MBA marketeers.
In short I never saw OCZ as a serious company. They were not a Corsair or some other startup that had real desires to make good hardware. Rather they had a lot of marketing push and very little else. The level of return on their SSDs was super high and once I saw that it told me all I needed to know about them. Anyone can make some RAM and slap on some crafted aluminum heatsink onto it. Not everyone can make a SSD.
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Yep.
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Then again, Intel's 330 is notorious for not getting along with T60/T61 Thinkpads [intel.com]. It happened to me as well - something about its power management didn't get along with my T61; it would randomly freeze the system for about 30 seconds, and no combination of registry hacks and/or driver upgrades or downgrades would fix it.
The workaround was to replace the drive with a Samsung 840. No more freezeups. The Intel drive went into one of my desktops, where it has worked flawlessly.
As for my OCZ experience, good ri
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Then again, Intel's 330 is notorious for not getting along with T60/T61 Thinkpads [intel.com].>/quote>
With stock firmware from Lenovo, SSDs are unsupported on T60/T61's. PERIOD. The are some third party firmware hacks that promise more stability. But, in general, it's luck of the draw on those machines.
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Then again, Intel's 330 is notorious for not getting along with T60/T61 Thinkpads [intel.com].
That seems more like a problem with the Thinkpad, not the SSD.
We were discussing reliability of SSDs.
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I've been quite happy with recent Samsung enterprise SSDs and some consumer Crucial (Micron) SSDs too. Different goals, different performance levels.
Thanks "Free" Markets (Score:2)
Had an OCZ power supply start failing with random computer crashes due to +12V bus causing dips due to load and 3 out of 4 purchased SSD OCZ Vertex 1 and Agility 1 drives failed with bad sectors and unreadable data.
I still have one of their still shrink wrapped and unpacked OCZ Vertex 1 40GB drives that nobody wanted to buy on eBay twice it was listed that I don't dare curse anyone with so it just sits in my closet. Will have to take it out of it's misery one day and shoot it or something but I certainly w
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If you don't want to play with bcache, dm-cache, or EnhanceIO on that SSD, then sell it to me at the bare minimum price and I will do it :)
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I still have one of their still shrink wrapped and unpacked OCZ Vertex 1 40GB drives that nobody wanted to buy on eBay twice it was listed
No, you simply didnt want to sell it at correct price and decided to keep it in spite of everyone, in effect getting nothing instead of real market value.
I knew it! (Score:5, Interesting)
Looks like... (Score:2)
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...their business model wasn't that solid, after all.
Some dark glasses and a "Yeeeeeaaaaaaaah" as requested, sir.
Rule of thumb for buying SSDs (Score:2)
Is this true, or are there more important factors to consider when choosing an SSD brand/model?
Re:Rule of thumb for buying SSDs (Score:4, Interesting)
The controller chip and firmware.
Most of the controllers/firmware put out by OCZ seemed like beta.
"Anything for a good benchmark score" was their motto. If it was fast, it shipped. Reliability be damned.
In other words... (Score:2)
I wonder what will happen to PC Power and Cooling (Score:2)
The Pre-OCZ designs were very solid power supplies. Would be a shame for that company to end as a result of OCZ's incompetence.
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afaik they rebadged Fortrons, just like Corsair, gamerXstreme and others.
Unreliable? (Score:2)
I have an OCZ RevoDrive, bought early 2011, and it works like a charm. The only problems I have with it is when installing a Linux distribution from scratch, but after figuring it out once it works very well.
Maybe I'm one of the lucky few who haven't had a problem with reliability?
SSDs need NAND.... (Score:2)
OCZ is/was a horribly managed company, but IMO one of their other core problems is/was that they arn't a flash memory (NAND) manufacturer... Difficult to compete on price when their major SSD competitors (Intel, Samsung, Crucial/Micron, SanDisk) all have their own fabs...
Nnnnnggggaaaahhhhh!!!!!! It is *dancing*!!!! (Score:4, Funny)
May be they should rename to orz
Happy *IOPS*! I am *squirting happy SATA*!
Why? The reason. Orz have the drives that *dissolve* or burst into several.
*Capitalist friends* have come to Toshiba *playground*.
Why are you coming to this?
Orz are just Orz.
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Maybe we shouldn't, considering that they had exactly one faulty model (barracuda 7200.11), which they replaced in about six months with with 7200.12 which did not have the problem. It died in exact same way (controlled failed in a specific way). I had that drive, and it died in that exact way. It was promptly replaced by a 7200.12 that I use to this day. My parents still have a pair of seagate's 7200.7s that have been working for almost a decade under heavy RAID load. No problems. That is average seagate q