Are the OCZ Vertex 2's failure prone?

[Melor]

I am parting out a new PC. I have been dying to get an SSD and have been looking over the one's for sale at Newegg. The OCZ Vertex 2 120GB ( and other Vertex 2's ) seem to have a lot of early failure complaints.

Is this a series prone to failure? Any suggestions for a drive in the 120-160 GB Range?

Thanks in advance.

Paul

 

[HendrixFan]

I had a Vertex 1 30GB drive that ran fine and is in my mother's machine now. I am currently running two Vertex 2's in RAID-0 with no problems.

I think some of the failure complaints may be due to the fact that more tinkerers pick up the OCZ drives than other SSDs and system instability may rear its head where before it didn't. Just a theory of mine though.

I used to have plenty of drive failures going back to my WD 120GB IDE drive days, but since I put a system fan dedicated to cooling my drives I have yet to have a drive failure since (6-7 years?).

 

[ss284]

My vertex 2 BSODed after waking from sleep, and was never detected again after that about 4 months after I got it. OCZ RMA service was fast, but it was still a pain in the ass. I would stick with Intel.

 

[alaricljs]

I have 2 Vertex 2's, one in my laptop and one in my server downstairs with 3 VMs running on it. No problems at all. The laptop drive is ~2 months old, server is 6months.

PS - 'parting out' something normally means you are disassembling and selling the pieces.

 

[nanaki333]

i have a 40GB in my old HTPC and it died after a couple of months. wouldn't be detected by the PC anymore. i got it back and set everything back up again only to have it fail AGAIN. this time it was still detectable and didn't need to be sent back, but i decided against using it again. it's sitting in a drawer in my closet now. i've been using GEN1 160GB intel SSDs in raid0 since almost the day they came out and never had a single failure.

 

[OILFIELDTRASH]

I've owned two OCZ ssd's and they've both worked great. I personnally wouldn't hesitate buying another.

 

[LokutusofBorg]

Have had three different ones running at work for months now 24/7 heavy load (development workstations) with zero issues.

 

[smackababy]

I got a Vertex 1 60GB around their release date, and have been using it as an OS drive since. I have had zero problems and would buy another should the need arise.

 

[nanaki333]

my friend has an onyx drive still that works great, and i still have a vertex 1 as a boot drive in a work computer. i just haven't had luck with the sandforce vertex 2 drives

 

[AnchorMan]

Had a vertex 2 die on us this past friday, absolutely NO warning. It just died (sata link failure) (so the controller i would imagine died) . Luckily i didn't have any sensitive data on it. (I figured i'd vet the hardware before doing that) Looks like my conclusions where correct.

I expected the drive to fail but not only a month and a half after i got it, not without ANY warning signs and with absolutely no safeguards.

The drive isn't recognized in any bios on any system or in any capacity or with any platform on either.

Thats a shame i had high hopes for SSD's.



A good tip would be to only use the SSD as a boot and "scale" device for games or graphics intense work. And Change the "user" environment in windows to another and/or ~./ ("home") environment in linux when using the "adduser" command to another.

Another = Being Other magnetic disk(s).

You can even setup even further safeguards by setting up a "+important doc" context menu command that would auto burn your files or folders to optical media while the system is idle without writing a TOC command or closing the media (i recommend a DVD in this case).

I'm curious what is stored in the user environment, for instance windows update logs or performance and security logs? And if or not you can set this "thrashing" to the magnetic disk to only occur when the system is idle? That would be very helpful with cpu performance???????




___


It seams like the company seagate got it right with their Momentus hybrid and Momentus hybrid XT drives, that use !?SLC!?(can someone confirm "slc"?) 4GB SSD nand and up to a 500GB magnetic disk for mass storage.


!!
The question is however if the controller on any of these hybrid type "SSD"'s are hot swappable and dont require any soldering or highly expensive equipment to replace the controllers when and if they fail ???? :-/


___

In closing

No seriously tho., Be careful also if you DO buy a SSD to make sure it doesn't have on board encryption because if it DOES fail you might have to pay a data recovery company more than the drive is worth in most cases.

 

[XLNC]

More so than early failures, there is a possibility that the new Vertex 2 drives aren't as fast the older ones. Rumor is that OCZ switched the NAND cells from 34nm process to 25nm process which is slower. I bought it from Newegg last week and it's working fine so far but OCZ now reeks of dishonesty IMO.

Read this thread before you decide to buy one:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2140453

 

[CraigRT]

I have a Vertex2 120GB.
I love it.

 

[wpcoe]

Rumor is that OCZ switched the NAND cells from 34nm process to 25nm process which is slower.

What is it about the 25nm which makes it slower?

 

[Rifter]

When and if they fix the sleep issues then maybe they will be considered reliable. I have 3 freinds with OCZ drives(one vertex, 2 vertex 2) that all have issues coming out of sleep intermittantly. While thats not a big deal if you dont use sleep for alot of users it is a issue, and the main reason i went with a Intel drive.

 

[Emulex]

What is it about the 25nm which makes it slower?

twice as dense. can use 1/2 the chips. if you realize all ssd is a big raid-0 it's like going from 8 chips to 4 chips

 

[Rifter]

twice as dense. can use 1/2 the chips. if you realize all ssd is a big raid-0 it's like going from 8 chips to 4 chips

You nailed it, of course this wouldnt be a problem if the capacity went up by twice as much, then it would be the same number of chips.

 

[CalBandMan]

My vertex 2 BSODed after waking from sleep, and was never detected again after that about 4 months after I got it. OCZ RMA service was fast, but it was still a pain in the ass. I would stick with Intel.

I just had the same thing happen to my Vertex 2 90GB. It worked fine for 3 weeks out of the box, then BSODed upon waking from sleep and that was it. The BIOS sees my other HDs but not the Vertex 2. I'm giving OCZ another chance with this drive's replacement, but definitely wouldn't recommend using these drives to store any valuable data.

 

[frostedflakes]

Interesting link that has some return rates (which it's important to keep in mind isn't the same as failure rate, return rate can also include problems that are related to user error and stuff like that) for products from a French computer parts retailer. I wouldn't take the statistics shown here as gospel, but they can provide some insight into failure rate IMO. For SSDs the return rates by brand are as follows.

- Intel 0,59%
- Corsair 2,17%
- Crucial 2,25%
- Kingston 2,39%
- OCZ 2,93%

Here's a link to the full article.

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/810-1/taux-pannes-composants.html

 

[Pohemi]

I've been using a 120GB Vertex 2 for six months or so with no issues. I NEVER allow my computer to sleep or hibernate fwiw.

Thinking about getting a second one to RAID0 them, but honestly I'd like to go to either a pci-e or SATA 6.0Gb type...

 

[jimhsu]

First off, releasing a slower performing and smaller drive (25nm) and not indicating the change on the packaging is a mistake. But so far, OCZ's response to this issue has been, to put it mildly, regrettable.

So far, the new drives have:
- 20-60% lower performance on uncompressible data
- 5GB (on the 120GB at least) less storage
- NO indications on the packaging wherever regarding the change

If it were faster, I'd assume OCZ would be all over it and put up ads for the new "Vertex 2 Extreme" edition. I guess "Vertex 2.1: slightly slower, and smaller to boot. At least it's cheap" doesn't work.

I had a Vertex 2 in my shopping cart a few days ago, but I'm not sure I can trust that brand ever again. Sorry, but this is a stupid business decision.

 

[Emulex]

why would you buy sandforce i told you there is only one drive i've seen that is 99% stable the G2 (ADATA S599) - the others are like 98 and less % prone to BSOD/sleep recovery issues. to me 99% is still epic fail when intel is 100% always.

 

[LokutusofBorg]

why would you buy sandforce i told you there is only one drive i've seen that is 99% stable the G2 (ADATA S599) - the others are like 98 and less % prone to BSOD/sleep recovery issues. to me 99% is still epic fail when intel is 100% always.

Uh... was that a typo? Or am I just not reading it how you're trying to say it?

http://www.adata.com.tw/?action=product_feature&cid=3&piid=33

"Equipped with the latest SandForce SF-1222 processor, ADATA's S599 Solid State Drive delivers remarkable performance."

 

[alaricljs]

You're not interpreting what he's saying...

Emulex wants perfection from his SSDs which he feels Intel has. Fortunately I understand what he's on about and it's not a %100 perfect drives, it's that there are far too many bugs floating around in SF based SSDs. I don't recall any *bugs* in Intel's, think there was one issue that got patched but I don't remember what it was and Intel addressed it.

Of the SF based drives Emulex feels the Adata S599 is the cream of the crop, but it still has it's flaws.

 

[OILFIELDTRASH]

I replied earlier in the thread I've owned 2 OCZ ssd's and no problems with any of them. Well it's up to 3 now. I just bought an OCZ agility and it has been working flawlessly. As far as the sleep issue I've been running a vertex 120gb as my main drive in my laptop and it has no sleep issues at all. I might put it to sleep 3-4 times a day. I guess I've been extremely lucky that I've owned 3 different OCZ drives now without issue.

 

[F1shF4t]

I replied earlier in the thread I've owned 2 OCZ ssd's and no problems with any of them. Well it's up to 3 now. I just bought an OCZ agility and it has been working flawlessly. As far as the sleep issue I've been running a vertex 120gb as my main drive in my laptop and it has no sleep issues at all. I might put it to sleep 3-4 times a day. I guess I've been extremely lucky that I've owned 3 different OCZ drives now without issue.

Is that vertex 2 or the original vertex 1? The original uses indilinx controller which doesn't have sleep issues. Agility 1 is also indilinx. Its the sandforce controller based SSDs which are buggy.