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> Once-great They were never great. They lied to their customers by selling hardware under the same name as previously produced hardware with cheaper componen

• jkbyc 13y ago
  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.
  • uptown 13y ago
    Same here. Swapped out the stock drive in my MPB with a Vertex 3 in April 2011, and its been rock solid ever since with everyday-use.
    • srdev 13y ago
      I'll provide a dissenting data point. After going through 5 RMA's with Vertex 2 drives, I finally convinced them to just upgrade me to a Vertex 3, due to reports of better reliability. The Vertex 3 failed within a week. Considered the drive a lost cause, swapped in a Crucial M4 -- been rock solid ever since.
      • nickff 13y ago
        I had a similar experience with the Vertex 2, and switched to Intel 320 and subsequently Samsung 840 Pro. Intel and Samsung drives have done a great job, while I had 3 Vertex 2 failures.
    • bryne 13y ago
      Everyone on HN is glad you're happy, but your single data point does fly in the face of statistically significant reliability problems with OCZ drives (ie, the only real way to evaluate storage manufacturers).
      • scott_karana 13y ago
        Do you have actual statistics? I'd truly like to see them. Most of the reliability problems I've seen have been self-reported, so I'm not sure what biases are present in what I've seen. ;) (I agree that many of their practices were bad, which likely lent to bad drives! This isn't trolling, just genuine curiosity if there were published stats)
        • Mithaldu 13y ago
          Enjoy: http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=2&hl=it&ie=UTF8&prev=_t&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=fr&tl=en&u=http://www.hardware.fr/articles/862-7/ssd.html&usg=ALkJrhjYW5hePOLf3fELOQmp2PsCCvVSRg http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=2&h... http://www.hardware.fr/articles/911-7/ssd.html http://www.hardware.fr/articles/911-7/ssd.html
          • Steko 13y ago
            And from 2012: http://www.behardware.com/articles/862-6/components-returns-rates-6.html 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 returns are linked to the 8MB bug which has since been resolved. The OCZ rate has got a lot worse, going up to 7%, and only OCZ has models with rates of above 5%: - 15.58% OCZ Vertex 2 Series SSD 240 GB - 13.28% OCZ Vertex 2 Series SSD 160 GB - 11.76% OCZ Vertex 2 Series SSD 80 GB - 9.52% OCZ Vertex 2 Series SSD 120 GB - 8.57% OCZ Vertex 3 Series 120 GB - 7.49% OCZ Vertex 2 Series SSD 60 GB - 6.61% OCZ Vertex 2 Series 3.5" SSD 120 GB - 6.37% OCZ Vertex 3 Series 240 GB - 6.37% OCZ Agility 3 60 GB - 5.89% OCZ Vertex 2 Series SSD 100 GB The Vertex 2s have the worst scores but the Vertex 3s have nothing to be proud of either. Note that over the coming period, the Vertex 3s are doing much better thanks to developments in the firmware, with a rate of just 1.01% for the Vertex 3 120 GB as things stand.
    • gcb1 13y ago
      please, unless you compared their offering with other ssds or used their support forums, this comment is as empty as it can be. ssds are better than spinning media, so what? even the worst one would make you happy. this is not the point. they constantly send one device to reviewers and then put lesser specs on the shelfs, or less immorally, just updated the revision silently to cut costs. i have a couple of them. i regret buying because what i got was something equivalent to something i could have gotten cheaper. also, admins often mocked people on the support forums.
  • fletchowns 13y ago
    No, it is so bad. OCZ was a terrible company and nobody is going to miss them.
    • onedev 13y ago
      Either explain why or save your breath :|
    • parasubvert 13y ago
      My Vertex 4s are doing well after 18 months and my crucial m4s died within 6 (power system failures). I'll miss ocz.
      • Mithaldu 13y ago
        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 http://www.hardware.fr/articles/911-7/ssd.html
  • whitewhim 13y ago
    I've had to have them replace my OCZ Vertex 2 three times.
    • yeukhon 13y ago
      I was lucky I got RMA and got a replacement. I sold the replacement on ebay once I got it and ever since I couldn't trust another SSD myself. Though I am still very happy with the SSD that comes with my Macbook Pro 15"
    • AdamTReineke 13y ago
      One of my Vertex2's died and I need to send it in on warranty (if it isn't too late). The other one is doing fine for now.
    • scotty79 13y ago
      Both of my OCZ Vertex 2 died on me. I was able to bring one back from the dead with firmware upgrade and repartitioning and reformatting. Second one serves as interesting although bit thick coaster. Couldn't return them to manufacturer because they were not bought from one of their listed retailers. I couldn't return them to the shop either because they worked few years before any trouble happened.
• jotm 13y ago
  Also using actual buyers/users for testing their drives and firmware. Not cool at all...
• danielvinson 13y ago
  Those numbers are actually incredibly skewed and not very accurate - I can confidently say that a large amount of the returns in the Vertex 2/3 and Agility 2/3 lines were due to firmware problems which were fixed very early on. Customers simply didn't understand that upgrading firmware was not optional, and the support team was not large/capable enough to teach this to every customer. Many of the drives which were returned were simply re-flashed to the new firmware and sent back, working perfectly.
  • Osiris 13y ago
    I have 4 OCZ SSDs of various models. When I bought them I'd read the forums and there was almost always a notice about upgrading the firmware to fix issues. I always kept up on firmware updates and I've never had a problem with a drive. However, the problem is that the retail firmware on the drive shouldn't have had the kinds of problems that would require a firmware fix.
• JohnBooty 13y ago
  Probably the best thing you can say about OCZ is that they played a huge role in establishing the consumer SSD market. Their original Vertex series had its rough edges but was a real breakthrough - they were the first to really push a "modern" SSD controller in the form of the Indilinx Barefoot. At the time, most other SSD drives on the market used horrible JMicron flash controllers that were more suitable for your camera's memory card; they were not really designed to cope with the traffic a desktop operating system would throw at them. Back in the Vertex/Vertex2 days they really were the ones to beat for the most part. But then Intel came along with their incredibly stable SSDs and frankly, OCZ's drives started to seem like toys. Part of OCZ's problem is that, starting with the Vertex 2 era, dozens of other companies used Sandforce controllers just like OCZ did. At that point OCZ obviously tried to compete on price and we can see what it did to their quality. To their credit, they made a really commendable last stab at relevance when they bought Indilinx so they could have their own custom controller and (maybe?) stop competing on price. Those drives got some great reviews although I don't know if they were reliable or what.
• josteink 13y ago
  > 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.
  • alanctgardner2 13y ago
    > 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?
• jwr 13y ago
  > 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.
  • jrs235 13y ago
    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.
    • ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
      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.
    • _pmf_ 13y ago
      Apple does the same with its display manufacturers.
  • AshleysBrain 13y ago
    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.
• znowi 13y ago
  > At best they had a great marketing department that made it possible for them to peddle their crap to the public for so long. They also chose the most susceptible target market - teen gamers and overclockers. "Being cool" is their mantra and OCZ delivered.
• oahziur 13y ago
  "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...