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Data Storage Hardware

OCZ Launches Vector Indilinx Barefoot 3 SSD, First All In-House Design 122

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the intel-sans-gouging dept.
MojoKid writes "Not many SSD controller manufacturers have been able to compete with the likes of SandForce and the myriad of SATA drives from various OEMs on the market that are based on their technology. However, OCZ took a different approach recently when they acquired SSD controller manufacturer Indilinx and PCI Express Switch maker PLX. Today the company took the wraps of their new Vector line of SSDs. The Vector is the first drive from OCZ to utilize only technologies developed by the unified Indilinx, PLX, and OCZ teams (except for the actual NAND flash), since the acquisitions. The Vector is based on the new INDILINK Barefoot 3 controller, which in terms of its features and specifications, looks competitive with some of the fastest drives on the market currently. In the benchmarks, the drive's IOMeter and CrystalDiskMark scores line up well and OCZ is offering a 5 year warranty on the product."
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OCZ Launches Vector Indilinx Barefoot 3 SSD, First All In-House Design More

OCZ Launches Vector Indilinx Barefoot 3 SSD, First All In-House Design

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  • OCS and Patriot SSDs are terrible. (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    All the six drives ive had started going bad by returning corrupted data (no errors shown on SMART, just bluescreens).
    Never buy lifetime warrantied products from eithe of those companies. Patriot refused my lifetime warrantied drive by claiming it was damaged in the mail and OCZ just flat out refused claiming the drives werent currently manufactured (although under warranty).

    • Re:OCS and Patriot SSDs are terrible. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by PlusFiveTroll ( 754249 ) on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @01:02PM (#42119631) Homepage

      All the six drives ive had started going bad by returning corrupted data (no errors shown on SMART, just bluescreens).
      Never buy lifetime warrantied products from eithe of those companies. Patriot refused my lifetime warrantied drive by claiming it was damaged in the mail and OCZ just flat out refused claiming the drives werent currently manufactured (although under warranty).

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty_Act [wikipedia.org]

      Anytime a manufacture tries to dick with me about a warranty I name toss the above, along with FTC, Postmaster General, and the State Attorney General. Sorry, you can't advertize a warranty then say it doesn't exist. The Patriot one is a little harder to deal with, regular HDD manufactures look for any reason in shipping to void your warranty, so make sure you follow their packing directions. When the manufactures do try and mess with me, I make sure there newegg and amazon product lists get the message. Of course, when I get treated well, I make sure everyone knows about it too.

      • All the six drives ive had started going bad by returning corrupted data (no errors shown on SMART, just bluescreens). Never buy lifetime warrantied products from eithe of those companies. Patriot refused my lifetime warrantied drive by claiming it was damaged in the mail and OCZ just flat out refused claiming the drives werent currently manufactured (although under warranty).

        The original post, by an Anonymous Coward, has vanished, so I am having to quote it from PlusFiveTroll's quoting of it.

        For quite some time now all SSDs have had 3 year limited warranties. I can't remember if anybody ever truly offered a lifetime warranty. If they did it was probably 2+ years ago. For what it's worth, I bought a 256 GB Crucial SSD in Jan. 2011 and it still works great. Some really are defective out of the box, but the number one thing to remember is that before you use it, you must

    • I have anecdotal evidence to offer as well. I've had a 120gb vertex 2 for two years as my primary desktops primary hard drive which gets used daily. Never had a problem with it, still runs great.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by trum4n ( 982031 )
        same exact conditions here, but Vertex 3 120gb. zero issues.

      • I'm running two Vertex 3 60GB drives in possibly the worst configuration from a reliability perspective: RAID0

        It's been about a year without an issue. I'm hoping that my old rule of thumb for solid state devices holds: If it doesn't break in 45 days, it should last for years.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dbIII ( 701233 )
          I've had a couple like that (120GB, two different generations of OCZ drives) and was paranoid enough to rsync it to a spinning disk every hour, but never needed to use that copy (and yes, I know a live copy is not a backup, I had real backups on tape a couple of times a week too). I used it that way for a couple of years until the stripeset was too small for the purpose, then split it up to use as OS drives on a couple of desktops. Small sample size maybe, but sometimes they work OK.
          It took about 3 or 4 t

          • IF you don't mind me asking, what size strip did you find to work best for you?

            In my case, I'm using the drives as an OS/game file ONLY array. I wanted 120GB of storage, (60 is just slightly too small for modern games and an OS). I'm running 16GB of ram, so I completely removed the swap file. In theory, the writes on them should be pretty limited except for when I'm installing new programs, updating settings, and a few logs. I probably could get by with two 120gb drives in a RAID1 to maximize read per

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by dbIII ( 701233 )
              Forgot :( I don't think it was the obvious 4k or 1k. Using two different models is probably why I needed a size that suited both.
              It's going to vary between models of SSD anyway and is going to be a multiple of the SSD block size. Sometimes that isn't published.

    • All the six drives ive had started going bad by returning corrupted data (no errors shown on SMART, just bluescreens)

      BSOD could be from anything. Hardly an accurate way to determine a bad hard drive.

      To be fair, I've been using OCZ Agility 3 drives for something like 5 years now and have only had 1 problem drive (back in 2007 I think) which OCZ replaced, no questions asked.

      Been running two (linux MD) RAID1 arrays of them for about a year production (mysql) as well as a 500G in my desktop. I also have an iSCSI server serving shares off a single drive (testing environment) which has been up for over a year. They work more

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by haruchai ( 17472 )

        I have several OCZ SSDs, the 2 oldest are 60GB Solid (JMicron) and I have to throw them out as they hang Windows when connected.
        But the 3.5 Vertex 2 120GB (well 107GB formatted) which is about 18 months newer than the Solids runs fine and I just got a deal on a Vertex 4 256GB which I hope will last for a good while - 5 yrs warranty.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mcgrew ( 92797 ) *

        BSOD could be from anything. Hardly an accurate way to determine a bad hard drive.

        Indeed, ten years ago I was getting bluescreens because of a flaky power supply. But as to your having no problems, you're running Linux. Linux is far more robust than Windows; the above mentioned PC was dual boot, and the Mandrake side had no problems whatever, while it would bluescreen constantly in Windows.

        • Well, I can certainly confirm that bad ram can crash Linux, too. Really, if the hardware doesn't work, there's little or nothing the OS can do to protect itself. (And by the way, I found Minecraft (java) to be a much more stringent test than memtest86!)

          • Linux can work around [sourceforge.net] that.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by mcgrew ( 92797 ) *

            Really, if the hardware doesn't work, there's little or nothing the OS can do to protect itself.

            Well, any hardware can be flaky, and some hardware flakiness will of course always be fatal. I've fortunately never had the misfortune of getting bad memory. Well, not computer memory anyway (I'm getting old and my meatram seems to be getting full).

      • Do those SandForce SF-2281 based drives still have that BSOD issue? I've heard from some sources that a firmware update fixed the problem, and I've heard from others that it's reduced in frequency, but not entirely fixed.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        Problem is, OCZ has openly admitted to its SSD drivers causing blue screens with certain message. Parent is likely talking about those.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

      A new Components returns rates report just came out and the failure rate of some of OCZ's models is shockingly bad, they have indeed been selling duds.

      BeHardware Return Rates report [behardware.com]

      • OCZ's had some troubles recently. I don't know how they can stay in business much longer with DOA rates on some of their products in the range of 40%. That's just embarassingly bad.
    • Oddly enough the large number of failures in SSD drives depends on the controller and the article is about them using a different one. It won't be clear for some time if this other controller is more reliable.

  • Benchmarks don't mean much... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Joce640k ( 829181 ) on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @12:50PM (#42119425) Homepage

    We've reached a point where benchmarks don't mean much to me. They're all fast enough.

    What I want to know is how reliable is it? All new tech, all new driver chips? I think I'll let other people be the guinea pigs for this...

    • Re:Benchmarks don't mean much... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @12:57PM (#42119551)
      omg wut do u mean? fast iz important i hav a quadcore custom gaming system with like 4 graphics cards and the ram has heatsinks n shit!!! my parents just bot me a new case wit like 8 fans, it looks so boss. i get like 400 FPS in CS, its really 1337. BOOM HEDSHOT!!!

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by h4rr4r ( 612664 )

      It is from OCZ reliability is not what they do, they do fast.
      If these drives are already fast enough for you then don't even consider this product.

      • I would also avoid ocz if you care about reliability. mostly, I do not see good reports on their products. they don't make data reliability and integrity their #1 goal and I think that's a mistake in a *memory* company.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      What I want to know is how reliable is it? All new tech, all new driver chips? I think I'll let other people be the guinea pigs for this...

      Well it's not like the other SSDs on the market are exactly tried and true models, honestly it looks to me like the drives have grown more and more mature with each generation. I'd trust them enough, meaning I wouldn't really trust any storage media not to have a fatal crash. Still, at least around here the new Vector comes with a pretty solid premium to an equivalently sized Vertex 4, which should have the worst bugs beaten out of it now.

      • Well it's not like the other SSDs on the market are exactly tried and true models.

        Yeah, but you can err on the side of reliability on the drawing board.

        I'll stick with manufacturers who do that, even if they charge a few bucks more and only come third in benchmarks.

      • Well it's not like the other SSDs on the market are exactly tried and true models

        Samsung 830 is.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Jamu ( 852752 )
          Very happy with mine. But the 830s are becoming harder to find since the 840 came out.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by virgnarus ( 1949790 )

      This is OCZ we're talking about, as in reliability is a distant thought for them. If you're willing to gamble getting a 1 out of 8 chance of purchasing a drive that'll last at least a year for the sake of speed, then you'll do whatever you can to get it, which means going for OCZ. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence and an A+ cert or equivalent knowledge will know better to just grab a few reliable SSD drives from some other brand and run a RAID with em.

      • Except running a RAID on SSDs is stupid because it breaks just about everything and gives no performance improvements. Most RAID controllers don't pass TRIM properly.

        • People still use RAID controllers? You know, your CPU is a hell of a lot faster than the one on the RAID controller, and with PCI-E it hardly seems worthwhile to try to minimize bus bandwidth.

          • My CPU is a hell of a lot faster than the 300MHz clock in the nVidia GeForce FX5400 too, yet when I had a 2GHz CPU the GeForce was a billion times faster... bus was a lot closer to the RAM I guess. RAID controllers also can cache with battery/capacitor back-up, so in the event of a system fault or a power drop your RAID array isn't scrambled and inconsistent.

            • My CPU is a hell of a lot faster than the 300MHz clock in the nVidia GeForce FX5400 too, yet when I had a 2GHz CPU the GeForce was a billion times faster... bus was a lot closer to the RAM I guess.

              Your CPU is not faster in every way than the GPU. Try again.

              RAID controllers also can cache with battery/capacitor back-up, so in the event of a system fault or a power drop your RAID array isn't scrambled and inconsistent.

              It won't necessarily help you in the case of a system fault, and a UPS is a better solution for dealing with power failures. It's better to write changes out to the disk and shut down than to trust your data integrity to a three dollar battery.

  • Pricey (Score:3)

    by Lucas123 ( 935744 ) on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @01:00PM (#42119577) Homepage
    The 128GB model of the Vector SSD will retail for $149.99, the 256GB model for $269.99, and the 512GB model for $559.99. I guess OCZ didn't get the memo that consumer-grade SSDs are selling for well under $1 per gig these days.

    • Re:Pricey (Score:5, Funny)

      by h4rr4r ( 612664 ) on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @01:01PM (#42119595)

      These are fast, not cheap.
      Normally that would mean you also get "good", but this is OCZ so all you get is fast.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by poity ( 465672 )

      It seems like a good drive, and it's competitively priced against the current the Samsung 840 Pro. Though, the current generation of SSDs aren't much of an upgrade from the previous. 50k IOPS vs 90k IOPS isn't noticeable for 99.99% of people (and you're probably better off building RAM drives if that extra 40k IOPS makes a significant difference to you). And I think you're right, most people seem to be looking for SSD capacity instead of speed now, at least from the deals forum posts I've seen, and holding

  • I wouldn't. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by stonecypher ( 118140 ) <stonecypher&gmail,com> on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @01:00PM (#42119587) Homepage Journal

    I bought one of their PCI drives - a RevoDrive X2. It was unbelievably fast.

    To die. I barely used the thing, and it failed hard in about three months. Three months ago.

    I'm still waiting on my replacement. I called them, and they authorized an RMA. Then I mailed my card in. Two months later, they called me (during Hurricane Sandy, despite that they had my address and knew perfectly well I couldn't answer questions,) to see if I still wanted my replacement (!) and would I give them their RMA number (!!) so that they could finally get around to it.

    I told him my power was out and that I would love to have what they had promised me months ago, but I couldn't give him the RMA number at that time. He said he'd call back in a couple days. (Still not sure why he didn't just mail the drive.)

    I haven't heard from him since, despite having left several messages with a suspiciously similar sounding "other" staff member who assures me that *this* time I'll get a call back.

    It's a shame; the drive is wonderfully fast. However, it's unacceptably fragile, and I can't cope with their staff just never getting around to doing their jobs.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by slaker ( 53818 )

      I had a 10 week wait getting a replacement for a 32GB SLC drive from OCZ. They did not respond to support emails made on their web site, but they're very attentive if you go complain on Anandtech or HardOCP or something. In my experience, the shortest amount of time that an RMA from them has taken is a little under five weeks.

      One of my customers has some systems with Revodrives. They die and I just toss them rather than bother with replacement. Some of the machines I'm dealing with are on their third one in

    • Re:I wouldn't. (Score:4, Informative)

      by jones_supa ( 887896 ) on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @01:17PM (#42119827)
      On a sidenote, it's interesting how people here set up boycotts on companies like Sony because their PS3 can't run Linux, while there are companies like OCZ that have a solid track record of producing clearly bad products and providing poor customer support, which in my opinion would much more deserve the bad reputation.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by PRMan ( 959735 )
        Don't worry, OCZ is on a one-year ban list that keeps getting renewed. I allow new companies time to get things right before lifetime banning them. So far, I don't see any institutional evil, just making crappy products and getting overwhelmed with the support volume.

    • Re:I wouldn't. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by virgnarus ( 1949790 ) on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @01:22PM (#42119907)

      People who've suffered through an OCZ or cheap garden-variety SSDs are the reason why I've had to deal with a lot of FUD circulating about SSDs. The contrast in reliability from an OCZ to something like a Samsung is so black and white, which is an unfortunate circumstance for us who have used solid SSDs for even enterprise operations and are trying to cure these individuals of their woes. Often it stems from people who go compulsive shopping for SSDs and purchase the aforementioned because they want a quick and economic entry into SSD technology (testing the waters). Or they opt for something like an OCZ because they are gamers and not PC savvy and just go straight for the big numbers and benchmark results (same people that buy cheap PSUs). Either way it stems from ignorance, and if there wasn't so much disparity in quality between SSD brands there shouldn't be that much of a deal, but there is, so people start throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

      • As I am in the process of picking parts for a new computer and want to go the SSD route for the OS drives what would be the better ones to look at? I was aware of OCZ's reliability issues but hadn't heard much about other companies and would welcome any advice. My current thought was to go with the Micro Center branded (sound like it is a rebranded A-Data drive) 120GB ones that sell for about $80 but if there are substantially better drives I would gladly sacrifice size for reliability.

        • So obviously I don't know, since I picked wrong, yeah?

          But my datacenter thinks Intel and Samsung are the way to go.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by G00F ( 241765 )
          I would go intel. I've heard good things with samsung, but I haven't used them.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by lgw ( 121541 )

          Intel works for me. I have fairly old (very early model) Intel SSDs in a RAID0 in my gaming box, and another as my boot drive in my ersonal server - never had an issue.

        • In my opinion the Intel 320 and Crucial M4 are the most reliable. I bought an M4 earlier this year and I'm very happy with it so far. You can get a 128GB Crucial for $100 on newegg, or a 256GB for $200. The intel drives are more expensive, but they come with a 5 year warranty, where as the crucial m4's only have a 3 year warranty.

        • I will cast my chips in with the others on Intel, Samsung and Crucial drives. Samsung especially I've worked with in enterprise and can be some very stable puppies. Of course, every brand has their own bugs, though while OCZ and cheap brands require replacements, more refined brands like the previously listed are only a BIOS and drive firmware update away. Worst case scenario besides replacing the drive itself is that you'll just need to update the BIOS and firmware, tweak some settings in the BIOS (typical

  • Available now (Score:4, Informative)

    by lw54 ( 73409 ) on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @01:04PM (#42119643)

    The best thing about product launches being announced on /. is by the time it's posted, the product is already available.

    Newegg has the 128GB for $160, 256GB for $290 and 512GB for $570.

  • As good as a lifetime warranty if the company is not in business to honor it.

  • Slashdot just set a new record for the total number of abbreviations in a single summary.

  • OCZ did not buy PLX (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    OCZ bought a 40 person team from PLX. They did not buy the whole company.

  • I'm still holding off on SSD's. Speed? I don't need it, just STORAGE space (movies, mp3's, photos run through photoshop). Until the price per gig gets down to the mechanicals, and the reliability improves, I'll stick with a few t-byte drives.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dewin ( 989206 )

      Personally, I run a hybrid approach: I have 2x1TB spinny disk drives mirrored, and an 80GB SSD (soon to be 240GB SSD, hurray for Black Friday deals from newegg) for anything that needs to be fast.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by smash ( 1351 )
        I run a momentus XT in my home laptop (SSD at work). It's a very good trade-off. Next desktop I buy i'm going to RAID a bunch of them.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      I'm still holding off on SSD's. Speed? I don't need it, just STORAGE space (movies, mp3's, photos run through photoshop). Until the price per gig gets down to the mechanicals, and the reliability improves, I'll stick with a few t-byte drives.

      If you're buying a "few t-bytes drives" that's on a desktop and you're really missing out on the best of both worlds. Currently I have 13TB over 6 HDDs and one 128 GB SSD, there's no way I could replace it all with SSD and there's no way I'd want to replace it all with HDDs. The only annoyance I've found is that eventually I had to move my Steam directory to the HDD, games have too many big graphics assets to fit comfortably with the OS and my other software in 128 GB, now I have a comfortable 34 GB free. I

  • I'd been doing research over the past 6 months or so before I just ordered an SSD last week. OCZ has a terrible reputation for reliability. I always expect to see the occasional naysayers, but I was alarmed by the consistency of the criticism they get. Any product reviews for their lines are irrelevant if they're not after at least 6 months dedicated use IMO.

  • "utilize" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Onymous Coward ( 97719 ) on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @03:26PM (#42121733) Homepage

    To convert to practical use. Not simply to use.

    Simply using:

    Mike used the toothbrush.

    Versus turning something to practical use:

    Mike utilized the popsicle stick and onion bag from the trash, making an ad hoc toothbrush.

    So our summary instead reads:

    The Vector is the first drive from OCZ to use only technologies developed by the unified Indilinx, PLX, and OCZ teams.

  • They been in a tail spin this year. There are high hopes that this is something that could pull the company back towards profitability.
  • I'm never going to buy another OCZ drive. Had a vertex 2, worked well for a few months then, without any warning, it died completely. Couldn't be read by any OS, wouldn't even be recognised by the bios.

    As bad as losing data and RMA-ing a drive which potentially still had all my files on them, I also had to pay £20 to ship it insured to the Netherlands due to their awful returns policy.

    • OCZ might as well be PNY. They ought to just merge and get it over with. Both companies make fast hardware, but it's unreliable and their support policies are bullshit. PNY is extra-special super-magical because they demand a receipt for replacement of memory cards with a lifetime warranty. That's right, you're supposed to be able to find the receipt for something you paid $10 for three years ago.

  • First of all, OCZ did NOT buy PLX. They acquired a few employees from the company, but they did NOT buy the company itself.

    Second, this is not OCZ's first "all in-house" SSD, because it is not all "in house." OCZ still does not make their own NAND (thank God), so this is not an "all in house" drive.

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