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 rou

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.