Possible Regrets on my SSD purchase?

[TemjinGold]

Guys, those linked stats look serious! Based on that first link, we should totally stop buying ASUS, ASRock, and MSI motherboards, Corsair PSUs and RAM, G. Skill RAM, Sapphire and ASUS video cards, and WDC hard drives.

 

[groberts101]

OMG.. I just read it and you're right! My system definately must be a freak of nature then.. because I use ALL those in just this one system alone. Plus.. everyone knows that France is the #1 consumer for those particular brands too.. so they couldn't possibly be skewed in the slightest.

Time to start buying those powerball tickets again. :wub:

 

[jhansman]

Well, there's not much to be done at this point anyways... and I seem to have accidentally started a war between pro- and anti-OCZ factions. Sorry guys.

LOL. That "battle" has been going on for some time now. You gotta remember that everybody pretty much defends their product choice, be it cars or SSDs. Otherwise, they have to admit they chose poorly, and few are willing to do that. I stick with Samsung, Intel, or Crucial. The rest are of little or no interest to me.

 

[Mfusick]

The 256GB Agility 4 has an 8.5% return rate, which is not very good:

http://www.behardware.com/articles/881-8/components-returns-rates-7.html

The best SSD manufacturers average 1% or less:

http://www.behardware.com/articles/881-7/components-returns-rates-7.html

A quick scan through your post history reveals that all you do is enter threads and bash OCZ is a most biased manner.

While this is a solid provable fact what I do not understand or know is your motivation to do such ????

Enlighten us please. Did OCZ rape your mother/wife/daughter and kill your children and dog then burn down your house ????

 

[Mfusick]

@ OP. Agility uses a cheaper NAND inside so it is a bit less in speed and quality than the top level SSD's. But if it's working great and you like the capacity I would not regret it much.

Keep in mind the slower NAND is not limited as much because you have twice as much.

Larger SSD perform better than smaller SSD.

So a larger Agility 4 in 256GB size vs a smaller 120GB or 128GB SSD that is a better model is not going to be as much different. The Agility 4 is not as disadvantaged when it's twice the capacity as it is when it's the same capacity.

So- All in all if you value capacity and low cost it was a fine choice. If your budget was limited that it.

Of coarse you could get a SAMSUNG 840pro - but at the same capacity it would have been much more $$$$

You need to pick and choose what is important when your working with a budget.

If it's capacity, or Speed or reliability or cost... you can often only choose one or two if your budget limited.

Capacity your choice was great.
Cost your choice was great.
Speed= ok. real world it's a small difference in real life.
Reliability = No one can predict that.

I'd say you did fine. Enjoy your drive. There is always something better. But I doubt you would notice much difference with an more expensive drive.

 

[Mfusick]

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/643?vs=533

 

[Mfusick]

OP: All I can say is you've now heard every side you can in this thread. Believe what your gut tells you to believe and do what you feel comfortable doing. Don't let any one side make that decision for you.

Me personally, I'm kicking myself for not jumping on the $299 512gb Vertex 4 deal on BF.

That was a great deal on a beasty drive...

 

[rob.L]

I wonder if you realize that your argument is logically equivalent to saying that the vast majority of people purchasing the SSDs with high return rates are fools who don't know what they are doing, while the vast majority of people purchasing the SSDs with low return rates DO know what they are doing.

In other words, fools buy OCZ SSDs and smart computer-savvy people buy Samsung and Intel SSDs. You said it, not me. 😉

first of all that 8% return rate you quoted included drives from months ago when it was running on old firmware. Yes, the Agility 4 was rushed out with buggy firmware which led to more RMA's but the firmware has been fixed now so that 8% return rate is so misleading. Why do you hate OCZ so much? Every post you make is on this board is anti-OCZ

 

[jwilliams4200]

Why do you hate OCZ so much?

I do not hate OCZ. If you have truly read every post I have written in this forum, you would know that already. I have no emotions about OCZ (or any other corporation) one way or the other. I am only interested in the facts.

You, on the other hand, have just joined this forum, and every post you have made has been praising or defending OCZ. Why are you so interested in praising and defending OCZ?

 

[poohbear]

I've been running a ocz vertex 3 with latest firmware & it runs flawless. I imagine the millons of satisfied customers dont come on forums just to praise it. They only come when it doesnt work & they hafta complain!

 

[rob.L]

A quick scan through your post history reveals that all you do is enter threads and bash OCZ is a most biased manner.

While this is a solid provable fact what I do not understand or know is your motivation to do such ????

Enlighten us please. Did OCZ rape your mother/wife/daughter and kill your children and dog then burn down your house ????

lol either he was an OCZ shareholder that got burned bad or he is just another one of those people who thinks its popular and cool to bash OCZ although hes has no experience using one of their drives. All he does is lookup numbers to back his claims but I can do the same thing.For example, look at these reviews for the "reliable" M4 over the past 6 months. Most people will say those bad numbers are deceiving just like every post jwilliams makes about OCZ so you can't always judge an SSD by stuff you find online.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...scrollFullInfo

 

[rob.L]

I do not hate OCZ. If you have truly read every post I have written in this forum, you would know that already. I have no emotions about OCZ (or any other corporation) one way or the other. I am only interested in the facts.

You, on the other hand, have just joined this forum, and every post you have made has been praising or defending OCZ. Why are you so interested in praising and defending OCZ?

I had a Vertex 3 for over a year and now have a Vertex 4 and decided to join these forums and just noticed your biased anti-OCZ comments on other threads. I've never had any problems with any of my products and think most people who complain about problems just don't know what they are doing. Whether it be because they are not using the correct Intel sata ports, not updating their sata or BIOS drivers or not updating their SSD firmware. I bet some people defrag their ssds too and wonder why their drives die.

 

[blastingcap]

Use it as a Steam drive or something, that way if it dies you can just re-download your games.

I posted a while ago in General Hardware with a proposed build, but monetary flow contraints prevent me from getting all the parts at once--I'm nearly done purchasing now, with the exception of the actual CPU and a GPU.

In that time, I was unable to get a Samsung 830 or 840 at a good price (I assume their performance is essentially identical). Recently, there has been a sale on the 256GB OCZ Agility 4--twice the storage I was anticipating for about $20 more than I had budgeted. I sprang for it.

But now, after reading the Newegg reviews (which I take with a grain of salt, because a dissatisfied minority speaks much louder than the happy majority), I am starting to fear for reliability.

Should I be resting satisfied knowing that my dollars were well spent per gigabyte, or should I be writhing in agony as I realize what a low-quality drive I'm getting?

 

[jwilliams4200]

I had a Vertex 3 for over a year and now have a Vertex 4 and decided to join these forums and just noticed your biased anti-OCZ comments on other threads.

How are my comments biased? Everything I have written is either factual or based on facts.

You seem to have avoided the question about why you just joined the forum today and started praising OCZ in every post. Unless you are claiming that just because you have had two OCZ products that did not fail, that is sufficient reason for you to join a forum and do nothing but vigorously defend OCZ in every post. If that is your claim, I wonder how you can call me "biased" with a straight face.

As for problems with SSDs being people not knowing "what they are doing", do you think that a larger percentage of people who purchase OCZ SSDs do not "know what they are doing" as compared to the percentage of people who purchase Samsung SSDs who do not "know what they are doing"?

If so, then I think that says something all by itself.

If not, then the relative rankings of SSD manufacturers in the return rate statistics will not be affected by that, since the returns will have approximately the same percentages of false positives.

 

[rob.L]

why does anybody join the forurm? Yeah I just joined but what does that have to do with anything? I joined because I have interest in SSDs and I defend OCZ because I own some of their drives and speak from personal experience using them. I linked you to that newegg page of the M4 because based on that information you could claim all M4's are unreliable and junk but we all know the M4 is a pretty good drive and those numbers are probably misleading because people didn't update their firmware and thought the drives died. Same could be applied to some of OCZ related RMA's, especially with the Agility 4 since most of the RMA's were firmware related when first released. BTW, I find it funny how OCZ get bashed for releasing firmwares right after a product is released but when Samsung does it, it is ok lol. They even shipped reviewers buggy drives when you would think those are the drives that would be cherry picked and thoroughly tested before shipping out to them. Seems everybody is on the Samsung bandwagon as far as reliability and although the 830 was a great reliable drive, that does not mean the 840 will be so lucky. The 840 and 840 Pro uses new smaller die nand which has not been tried and tested like true 25nm MLC.

 

[Mfusick]

jwilliams4200 is a pure hater. Plain and simple. He offers no value in any threads and spends 90% of his time bashing OCZ.

I still do not understand his motivations

 

[Mfusick]

I do not hate OCZ. If you have truly read every post I have written in this forum, you would know that already. I have no emotions about OCZ (or any other corporation) one way or the other. I am only interested in the facts.

You, on the other hand, have just joined this forum, and every post you have made has been praising or defending OCZ. Why are you so interested in praising and defending OCZ?

I would call you a liar.

I will repeat for clarity if needed...

JWILLIAMS4200- YOU SIR ARE A LIAR. YOU TELL LIES.

I am calling BS.

I have never seen you post anything objective about OCZ. A quick scan through your post history will reveal your biased against them. You take effort and action to speak out against them at every turn- if you really did not care or were not really biased you would not even bother to comment like 99% of the forum users.

The facts you provide are also biased and out of context. You put great effort into searching for them.

If you want to see something and look hard enough usually you can find it and see it.

I don't know how your helping the OP. Or what your doing in this thread.


@OP

Read my comments earlier. I think your fine. You got a big capacity drive for very low $$$. It should work great.
There is little real world difference with another model.

You can always buy something faster or better- but is it worth the $$ ??

A samsung840PRO or VECTOR is going to run you double or triple the cost for the same GB size.

Stepping down to half the capacity might not make sense either because while you might get a faster model drive- smaller SSD's are slower than larger SSD's so the speed difference might not be worth the capacity you sacrifice.

I say enjoy your SSD.



You have an issue with this poster? Report him to the moderators.

Your accusations here have no proof. He doesn't care for OCZ, you do.

Either discuss this civilly or not at all. Name calling is not allowed in the tech forums


esquared
Anandtech Forum Director

 

[hal2kilo]

The 256GB Agility 4 has an 8.5% return rate, which is not very good:

http://www.behardware.com/articles/881-8/components-returns-rates-7.html

The best SSD manufacturers average 1% or less:

http://www.behardware.com/articles/881-7/components-returns-rates-7.html

8.5% return rate! That sucks.

EDIT: after going through all the posts, so does the sampling size.

 

[jwilliams4200]

I linked you to that newegg page of the M4 because based on that information you could claim all M4's are unreliable and junk but we all know the M4 is a pretty good drive and those numbers are probably misleading because people didn't update their firmware and thought the drives died.

No, I would not claim that all M4s are unreliable based on that one subset of data. You made a basic mistake in your methodology -- you took a subset of a subset of the data and then made a claim about all m4 SSDs based on a restricted sample. If you included all Crucial m4 SSD models, and all the review data, the obvious conclusion is that the percentage of bad newegg reviews on the m4's have increased during the past 6 months. A troubling statistic, to be sure, and one that should be considered by anyone looking at purchasing Crucial SSDs. But your specific conclusion does not follow from the available data.

Second, based on all available data, I would not call the Crucial m4 one of the highest quality SSDs. It is middling. Based on available data, the highest quality SSDs are from Intel and Samsung (also Plextor, but there is less data to support that claim).

OCZ has consistently produced the most problematic SSDs. One way to see this is to look at all the hardware.fr return rate data on SSDs. They have 2.5 years of it, going back to data reported in December 2010:

2010-Dec
- Intel 0.59%
- Corsair 2.17%
- Crucial 2.25%
- Kingston 2.39%
- OCZ 2.93%

2011-May
- Intel 0.3% (against 0.6%)
- Kingston 1.2% (against 2.4%)
- Crucial 1.9% (against 2.2%)
- Corsair 2.7% (against 2.2%)
- OCZ 3.5% (against 2.9%)

2011-Nov
- Intel 0.1% (as against 0.3%)
- Crucial 0.8% (as against 1.9%)
- Corsair 2.9% (as against 2.7%)
- OCZ 4.2% (as against 3.5%)

2012-Jun
- 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%)

2012-Nov
- Intel 0.45% (against 1.73%)
- Samsung 0.48% (N/A)
- Corsair 1.05% (against 2.93%)
- Crucial 1.11% (against 0.82%)
- OCZ 5.02% (against 7.03%)

Note that OCZ takes last place every single time! In comparison, Intel is first four out of five times (Intel had a bad 6 months when the 320 came out with the 8MB bug). Crucial is middling, never taking last but only slipping into first in the data reported on June 2012 (for "products sold between April 1st and October 1st 2011 for returns made before April 2012") when Intel stumbled with the 8MB bug. Within the margin of error, Samsung is tied for first with Intel in the only period where Samsung SSDs were included in the study.

As bad as that looks for OCZ, it gets worse. Starting with data reported in November 2011, hardware.fr reports those SSD models with return rates over 5%:

2011-Nov
- 9.14% OCZ Vertex 2 240 GB
- 8.61% OCZ Agility 2 120 GB
- 7.27% OCZ Agility 2 40 GB
- 6.20% OCZ Agility 2 60 GB
- 5.83% Corsair Force 80 GB
- 5.31% OCZ Agility 2 90 GB
- 5.31% OCZ Vertex 2 100 GB
- 5.04% OCZ Agility 2 3.5" 120 GB

2012-Jun
- 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

2012-Nov
- 40.00% for the OCZ Petrol 64 GB
- 39.42% for the OCZ Petrol 128 GB
- 30.85% for the OCZ Octane 128 GB SATA II
- 29.46% for the OCZ Octane 64 GB SATA II
- 9.73% for the OCZ Vertex 2 120 GB 3.5"
- 9.59% for the OCZ Vertex 2 120 GB
- 6.73% for the OCZ Vertex 2 60 GB
- 5.43% for the OCZ Agility 3 240 GB
- 5.12% for the OCZ Vertex Plus 128 GB

preliminary data reported 2012-Nov
37.19% for the OCZ Octane 128 GB SATA II
29.52% for the OCZ Octane 64 GB SATA II
28.10% for the OCZ Petrol 128 GB
22.48% for the OCZ Petrol 64 GB
8.52% for the OCZ Agility 4 256 GB

OCZ has seven out of eight of the worst models for data reported November 2011, 10 out of 10 for 2012-Jun, nine out of nine for 2012-Nov, and for preliminary data reported on 2012-Nov, OCZ again sweeps the worst models, five out of five.

OCZ clearly has the worst return-rate record of any major SSD manufacturer, by far. It is not even close.

Now, OCZ claims that they have improved their quality control with their most recent models. That may be true, but there is insufficient data yet to decide scientifically. If, at this time next year OCZ is still around and still selling SSDs, then we should have enough data to make a preliminary conclusion whether OCZ has indeed succeeded in improving the quality of their SSDs. Until then, anyone seeking a quality SSD and buying from OCZ is making a bigger gamble than they need to, when they could simply buy an SSD from another manufacturer with a better history of quality products.

 

[spinejam]

Use it as a Steam drive or something, that way if it dies you can just re-download your games.

I have my Steam / Origin folders on another drive and install the OS my OCZs. It's much faster to reinstall an OS than downloading / installing my 30+ games. :thumbsup:

I just reinstalled Win8 last week -- took ~10 minutes.