http://www.anandtech.com/show/5741/ocz-confirms-octane-and-vertex-4-use-marvell-based-silicon
I have been generally happy with the 128GB Petrol drive I bought from MC for ~$100 AMIR, and was thinking about buying another. My previous rule of thumb was "no sandforce" so I think this still works?
FWIW,
http://alex-is.de/PHP/fusion/downloads.php?download_id=9 causes my Petrol drive to become unresponsive, it doesn't finish. That does bother me. Latest firmware as of ~6 weeks ago.
Any Petrol/Octane lovers/haters out there? Or can OCZ drives still DIAF?
I got 2 of the same SSD (Petrol 128GB) just a few weeks ago based on the same premise of "no sandforce". Let me tell you my experience.
My first SSD was a Kingston SSDnow SNv425 64GB (jmicrom JM112?) already considered bottom of the barrel of the gen 1st SSDs. It was however night and day compared to the WD scorpio black I had before in the laptop, and the SSD was rock solid. Eventually I upgraded to a Kingston hyper-X 120GB (SF-2281 syncronous 25 nm) considered by several sites as one of the top current generation SSDs. The upgrade was driven by size rather than speed, and in all honesty, the only difference in speed could be seen in benchmarks and WEI because the machine felt exactly the same during daily usage.
The hyper-x, however, had this weird random "hang" once in a while, where the system would hang for 4-5 secs before responding again. Hangs would be occasional (once every 2 weeks or so) and because of that I sold the drive and went Indilinx with the Petrol.
Reliability over speed was key, and I got them despite the dreadful reviews at the egg. I barely give weight to those reviews as it is very common to see 1 egg reviews because "windows didn't see the drive, never mounted a letter..." (how about partitioning, formatting and assigning the partition first?)
One of the Petrols is in my laptop, the other in my desktop. Firmware got upgraded right after opening the drives. Right off the bat the one for my desktop was already reporting "caution" health status from within crystaldiskinfo. Firmware upgrade obviously cleared everything, but the firmware reflash took 2 tries in that same SSD to be successful. The other one was perfect, so I popped that one in my laptop.
The problematic one in my desktop loses the BCD info for win 7 twice per week, asking for a windows repair. I have only programs, and my backup image is up to date so that is why I risked it as the image restore takes only a few minutes. Still, it was already annoying to do the windows repair twice a week. It benched decently fast, and the WEI was 7.7 in a SATA 3 port off the SB950.
The other one in my laptop was a stark contrast, always smooth, always flawless. I have some important data on it, and while my backups are up to date, still, a week lost of data would be a week lost. The SSD, however, would not give me reason to worry so I was getting complacent. Then, one day, out of the blue, when starting the machine, I get a "chkdsk is checking drive d: for consistency". I made a backup of the data right after that. I get the annoying chkdsk once a week now. Twice a week backups... the SSD is already dying.
If your drive is working fine, just wait. It seems the NAND used in the petrol was the cheapest OCZ could get. I don't know if the nand is the same in the agility 3, or if other manufacturers use the same nand and will get hit also. Firmware seems fine, so I would say, yes, you can buy a OCZ SSD safely, just make sure is a vertex
