OCZ RevoDrive 350 PCIe SSD Hits 1.8GB/sec With Standard Toshiba MLC NAND 113
MojoKid (1002251) writes "OCZ was recently acquired by Toshiba and has been going through its product stack, revamping its SSD portfolio with fresh re-designs based on Toshiba NAND Flash memory for not only increased performance but better cost structure as well. OCZ has now replaced their RevoDrive family of PCIe SSD cards with an almost complete re-designed of the product. The RevoDrive 350 is based on the same OCZ VCA 2.0 (Virtualized Controller Architecture) technology as the previous generation but is now enabled with a PCI Express X8 card interface and up to 4 LSI SandForce SD-2282 SSD processors, along with 19nm Toshiba NAND Flash. The good news is, not only is the new RevoDrive 350 faster at 1.8GB/sec claimed bandwidth for sequential reads and 1.7GB/sec for sequential writes, but it's also significantly more affordable, at literally half the price of the previous gen RevoDrive 3 when it first launched. In the benchmarks, the new PCIe card excels at read throughput, regularly hitting its 1.8GB/sec claimed bandwidth, especially with sequential workloads. Write performance is solid as well and the drive competes with the likes of some higher-end and more expensive SLC NAND-based PCIe cards like LSI's WarpDrive and Intel's SSD 910."
Ignore these naysayers (Score:1, Informative)
Re:No. Absolutely not. (Score:5, Informative)
Unless the unit was damaged, modified or some grey market edition I don't know that they have a legal leg to stand on, you can file a complaint with the state attorneys generals office allege fraud for failing to honor the warranty. It also depends on what state you're in i.e. "Void where prohibited" since some states have stronger consumer protection laws than others and some of the warranty terms may not apply to you.
Why did they deny your request for a warranty replacement?
Re:No. Absolutely not. (Score:3, Informative)
He putted it in his microwave.
Re:Ignore these naysayers (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with many of OCZ's drives (like the Vertex2 and Agility2) was that traditional RAID wouldn't save you because whatever killed drive #1 could (and often did) kill one or more of your OTHER drives, too.
The fault lies 100% with OCZ. They omitted the supercapacitor that Sandforce's engineers intended to keep it powered up if it unexpectedly lost power during a write, and they compiled their drivers to NOT use the multi-step write strategy that a drive without backup power needed in order to write safely and recover gracefully from power loss (because multi-step writes killed performance).
Re:What about reliability? (Score:5, Informative)
Except you're assigning blame in the wrong place.
It is not MLC flash that's the problem. It's OCZ.
The problem with OCZ is they don't put data reliability first - they put speed first. So they compromised reliability for speed. One famous example is where the SandForce controller could run in two modes - a safe-but-slower mode where you don't need external power caps, and a fast-but-unsafe mode where you need power caps so it can dump the tables to flash on power off.
What did OCZ do? They did the fast mode without power caps. So remove power suddenly and the FTL tables get corrupted, losing your data. It's fast, though, and cheap (since you don't pay $$$ for caps), but boy is it a ticking time bomb.
Considering SATA-III limits are hit (or why every SSD is now the same speed), there's no need for performance - using that extra speed for safety is far better.
(It's also why we have PCIe SSDs, because SATA-III is now too slow, and it didn't take long for SSDs, once the standard was reached, to hit the max).
Re:No. Absolutely not. (Score:5, Informative)
I, on the other hand, have had terrible experience with Toshiba's US support department.
I live in Canada, and wanted to buy a model of Toshiba laptop that was only available in the US. Their warranty claimed to be international, and I called Toshiba USA to confirm this. At worst, I was told, I'd have to pay the shipping costs myself. I was fine with that.
Then I dropped the laptop. It was fine electronically, it was just that a chunk was missing from the chassis, so I needed to replace some parts of the laptop chassis.
I called Toshiba USA. They refused to have anything to do with me, saying that not only could they not ship the laptop back to me at my expense, they couldn't even RECEIVE the laptop at their repair centre. Their shipping department would refuse to accept any shipment from outside the country. They told me my only solution was to mail my laptop to somebody in the US and have *THEM* send it to Toshiba. Mind you this laptop was only a few months old, only a few months into a 3-year warranty.
I called Toshiba Canada. They refused to repair the laptop (at my cost) even though by then they sold the same laptop in Canada as my American model. They said that because the model numbers were different (even if the laptops were identical) they wouldn't touch it.
Because of this, the only way that I could get my laptop repaired was to mail it to one of Toshiba's authorized third-party repair companies in the US. In the end, I had to pay $600 to repair a $1200 laptop... even though only the chassis (which probably costs a few dollars at most) was broken, with all electronics perfectly fine.
To rub salt in the wound, they did a terrible repair job, violating Toshiba's own service manual, and incorrectly re-installed the keyboard.
As a result, I will never buy another Toshiba product, nor will I ever recommend anyone buy one. Considering that many of my friends have already been burned by OCZ, them being bought by Toshiba changes my recommendation to "Don't buy OCZ products because they have a super high failure rate and Toshiba will try to screw you over on replacements."