Can I trust the new OCZ?

[bononos]

I respect what you say, the main difference at storage solutions is near total eStaff and CEO change...thats whats made all the difference going forward, you will not have known this however. I do not regard you as a lost customer, i regard you as a potential new customer, ocz technology lost you as a customer, not ocz storage solutions.

What do you mean by "estaff"?There was possibly at least one viral marketer on AT (groberts101) who kept his affiliation hidden (against AT rules). He did let slip that he "beta tested" firmware and received free ocz products.

No customer likes to be hassled and annoyed by legions of fanboys and zealous fanboy moderators when asking for support and returns especially when OCZ had 5x higher failure rates or up to 40x for Petrol/Octane. OCZ needs to reevaluate how much stuff it gives away to moderators and viral marketers since it serves to feed the tiger in them.

OCZ brand image problem wasn't only caused by 2nd grade nand chips otherwise it wouldn't have also have quality issues with its computer memory and psu products.

 

[Owls]

Just because OCZ was bought out doesn't mean that everything magically changed behind the scenes. It's going to take a few more years with SOLID products and SOLID support before their image turns around.

 

[tweakboy]

OCZ used to be good, Not now.

 

[tweakboy]

They have a solid RMA department. and what not. gb

 

[tweakboy]

my dads blew up and they turn around was pretty quick. gl

 

[lukart]

I think they are going on the right direction. Besides new management they have now access to premium nand directly from the factory. They dont need to buy it from open market where they would be subject to less good nand compared to now.

 

[ctk1981]

I've owned a few OCZ products over the years and always seemed to perform fine for me. In fact I still have a Vertex and Summit drive that are both alive and well. The only thing that turned me off from OCZ SSD's were the destructive FW updates that were common to the vertex initially.

 

[ronbo613]

What do you mean by "estaff"?There was possibly at least one viral marketer on AT (groberts101) who kept his affiliation hidden (against AT rules). He did let slip that he "beta tested" firmware and received free ocz products.

No customer likes to be hassled and annoyed by legions of fanboys and zealous fanboy moderators when asking for support and returns especially when OCZ had 5x higher failure rates or up to 40x for Petrol/Octane. OCZ needs to reevaluate how much stuff it gives away to moderators and viral marketers since it serves to feed the tiger in them.

OCZ brand image problem wasn't only caused by 2nd grade nand chips otherwise it wouldn't have also have quality issues with its computer memory and psu products.

The one thing a business can't buy and it's very tough to change if it's bad; your reputation.

 

[Elixer]

There is no end user accessible method for this, unfortunately.

Since I had nothing better to do, I opened it up, and started looking around the circuit board. I saw what looked like a EEPROM chip (8 pin), so, I shorted out some pins just for the heck of it.

And... it actually came alive again! By that, I mean, no solid red LED, but it was blinking. Still couldn't access the SSD though.
Then I fired up the firmware flasher, and tried that... and on reboot, it was fully alive again!

So, now I am wondering, was this just a fluke, or did I stumble upon a recovery method ? I did notice all info on the SSD was gone, looking with testdisk found nothing at all.

I am now just running a series of writes to test if the SSD will survive more than a few hours.

 

[xLegenday]

They are well aware about their reputation issues and I believe that's the reason why they created their OCZ shieldplus program that lets you just swap your SSD for a new one if you believe you have issues with your current unit...at no cost!

 

[Railgun]

Still rockin 4x120G vertex 3s in a stripe. Been flawless since new. At the time, they were the best choice. Times have changed of course...

Now, the old ocz stock on the other hand...still hurts the rear.

 

[ocer9999]

They are well aware about their reputation issues and I believe that's the reason why they created their OCZ shieldplus program that lets you just swap your SSD for a new one if you believe you have issues with your current unit...at no cost!

True that, they should be quite good now.

 

[Elixer]

True that, they should be quite good now.

http://www.kitguru.net/components/ssd-drives/zardon/ocz-challenge-update-1x-arc-100-dies-at-322tb/

Regular readers will know of the challenge submitted to KitGuru by OCZ – to kill 5 of their ARC 100 Solid State Drives. If you need a recap, then head back to this original page posted on December 10th.

The drives all passed the warranty figure of 300TB on 3rd February 2015 – but one of them has just failed with 322TB showing before failure.

As promised to our readers, we report on any failures -as soon as they happen. This was one of the rules we made clear to OCZ before this project was started. Still, we don’t think they will be too annoyed – their warranty terms for these drives are 22TB, so a quick calculation shows that is 300TB more – not too shabby. The other 4 are still rocking away.

Toshiba seems to have pretty much fixed what needed to be fixed with the new OCZ.

BTW, this is the best part, (listen samsung!)

The ‘ShieldPlus Warranty system’ eliminates the requirement for ‘proof of purchase’ … if a drive fails. A brand new SSD is shipped to the OCZ customer of the same capacity, in advance. When the replacement is received by the customer they can then send their old faulty drive back with a prepaid envelope. Yes it all does seem too good to be true, but we can’t find any catch.

 

[SSBrain]

322 TB doesn't seem much for an endurance test made of sequential writes at a write amplification close to 1.0x, even if we're speaking of a 120GB model. But since the test was made on 240GB model, the that seems on the low side for an SSD to suddenly die.

EDIT: seeing SMART data in some of the screenshots they provided, it appears the NAND at about 300TB of Host Writes was at about 3500 P/E cycles performed, so I would guess it's a respectable enough result, even though not really exceptional for NAND memory that is supposed to still have 1 year of data retention at the end of its rated life (3000 P/E cycles). Write amplification was much higher than I thought (about 3x).

It looks like the NAND Writes count on CrystalDiskInfo is wrong as it's using 16kB programming pages in the calculation. By calculating them with the number of average P/E performed, it's clear they are consistent with 64kB pages.

Average Erase Count = DD1 (hex) = 3537 (dec)
3537 * 256GiB = 905472 GiB of NAND Writes

Total NAND Programming Count = 365382FBA = 955702340341830
955702340341830 * 65536 / (1024^3) = 890067 GiB of NAND Writes <-- which is more or less consistent with the calculation through the average P/E cycles count

 

[coercitiv]

322 TB doesn't seem much for an endurance test made of sequential writes at a write amplification close to 1.0x, even if we're speaking of a 120GB model. But since the test was made on 240GB model, the that seems on the low side for an SSD to suddenly die.

Nevertheless, 300TB endurance equals to around 40 years lifetime at 7TB per year (20GB/day - which is a very aggressive usage pattern).

We can safely assume these drives will not fail due to NAND fatigue.

 

[SSBrain]

@coercitiv: in the edited part, after giving a more detailed look at the data, I concluded that actually those SSDs fared better than I thought, although not as much as I would expect from premium Toshiba MLC NAND. Perhaps the latest "critical" firmware update for OCZ ARC100 SSDs improves error correction/handling when their NAND is used over the rated lifetime?

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8965/ocz-releases-critical-firmware-updates-for-arc-100-radeon-r7-ssds

 

[chubbyfatazn]

I'd give 'em a shot now that Toshiba's pulling the strings.

I remember seeing a 480GB Vertex 460 (or ARC100? I forget) for $140-150 on Black Friday, no rebates. Damn good deal for a cheap games drive.

 

[j03h4gLund]

I want to say no because of my bad experience with their RAM, one stick worked, one did not and getting an RMA was tough because their support was literally non-existent. I just remember getting their Leave a message voicemail which apparentlly noone listened to. I really wanted to say no but two years past and OCZ honored my memories warranty, and send me 8 GB of faster better ram for my 4GB that I had the warranty on... so who knows. By the way... this was back in 2008-2010 ish.

I would be reluctant but for the right price and the right item, I would probably take the risk.