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OCZ May Be On Its Last Legs
itwbennett writes "OCZ, one of the first commercial solid-state drive (SSD) makers has been blaming a shortage of NAND for its woes for some time now, but things have taken a precipitous turn for the worse: 'For its second fiscal quarter ended August 31, 2013, revenue was $33.5 million, a huge drop compared to revenue of $55.3 million for the first quarter of 2013 and revenue of $88.6 million for the second quarter of 2012. The net loss for this quarter was massive, $26 million, a doubling of the $13.1 million loss in the same quarter last year.' The company has burned through cash, its stock collapsed, and now so have sales. Meanwhile, other SSD makers are doing well. So what is happening here?"
They burned too many customers with "enterprise" devices that'd fail almost immediately, then treating the customers like shit when they did.
They bet too heavily on high performance, while not maintaining the kind of behavior that would bring back the customers who want devices like that.
The reason Dell and HP can get away with burning customers is simple: there's always another person who needs a cheap laptop.
Not many people need a new PCIe SSD.
Good riddance.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Rightly or wrongly, they earned a reputation for selling unreliable drives. Last winter I saw quite a few deals on mass market websites that featured refurbished OCZ drives at cut-rate prices -- I suspect they had a return rate that was significantly higher than the industry average.
All niche market products suffer the same fate when expectations for broad market type growth are assumed.
End of discussion.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Shitty unreliable drives that are way over priced and they treat there customers like shit ... this was easily predictable
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Every single NAND manufacturer now has an in-house team building SSDs that frankly are good enough for most users across the board.
Why would any of them sell NAND to OCZ when they can build that same NAND into their own SSDs for 40% or more profit?
Small NAND controller technology companies without long-term supply agreements are dying, and OCZ won't be the first.
OCZ sacrificed long-term profit and potential for higher short-term profit. Lower the cost of production by using cheap/crappy parts. Spend money on marketing to increase sales. Increase the cost of the product to offset marketing costs. You get a crappy product with a larger profit margin and hope no one notices. That's not the business plan for long-term success. The problem is that that's the business plan share holders and CEOs like. It makes them look good now. Nobody wants to buy and hold a stock anymore. Make me a big profit now! It's one of the reasons our economy is stuttering. You can't sell shareholders the idea that your goal is a stable and modest growth. You gotta be explosive with growth every quarter!
They also used rebates to make their products seem $20 less expensive. There's a new rebate every week, and the rebate expires after a week. So you must file for your rebate the day you purchase, or by the time to go to collect the rebate yours will have expired.Got burned by this once. Didn't turn me into a repeat customer.
I bought a vertex 2 when it first came out due to its incredible speed for use in a server. After a year the server slowed down to way slower than hard drives. I researched it to find out, that they built in a limiter, if you exceed the IO that will burn through the drive before the warranty ended they slowed down the drive so that it would last. This made the drive useless to me. I had to replace it with an intel drive. I will never buy another OCZ SSD.
Their failure rates were abysmal. A drive failing after 6 months is appalling. A drive failing suddenly after 6 months, suddenly with zero warning is completely unacceptable. Even if you have a backup routine, that's probably going to result in days of lost work, plus the need to re-install everything on another drive whilst you RMA it.
To add financial injury to insult, in the UK, RMA'ing an OCZ drive requires you to send it insured and recorded to the Netherlands. It cost me around £20 to send it off. I'm certainly never going to buy OCZ again. The 15% return rate for OCZ drives that failed after 1 year is unacceptable and frankly, should've been grounds for a recall.
See almost any forum on the internet. They have a terrible word of mouth (or finger to keyboard) rep
I have an OCZ Revodrive first gen 120GB and its never had a problem. I also have a Vertex 4 256GB thats been running solid since I got it. The only SSD I've ever had fail was a Patriot. That drive was a total slice of crap though. Maybe the popularity decline has sonething to do with them ditching Sandforce for inhouse designs...
I had terrible experiences with their drives and tech support. In one instance, to solve a Windows blue screen problem, their support told us to update the firmware on the drive, which bricked it. They then refused to return/repair the drive because "firmware updates void your warranty." In another case, we needed a quick replacement on a failed drive so we requested advance replacement. They immediately charged our card MSRP (double the actual retail price), but then it took them over 30 days to actually ship the replacement.
The quote in the article blames capital constraints, and difficulty acquiring, not a shortage. They are likely buying cheaper supply with higher failure rates, creating a death spiral.
If that is not the case, the author should kick himself in the balls repeatedly for using unrelated quotes to support a point, as I can't be arsed to dig past that stupidity.
Non story, failing company cuts corners and fails faster.
I don't know about other people, but I had nothing but bad experiences with their DRAM products. I would call their tech support and usually get a voicemail. They would never return those calls. If I called anothe department (sales always answered), they would just forward me to the same voicemail. If I was persistent enough, calling enoug times per day, I might get someone on the phone with technical support.
Their "performance" DRAM products seemed to deteriorate over time. I would configure my system with the exact voltage and timing numbers they specified and run a burn-in test. It would work great for the first couple of days. Perfect stabillity, good performance. Memory tests, kernel compiles, everything was great. But after the first few DAYS, it would all go to hell. There were no hard memory errors, but the system would start crashing during compiles. With a lot of effort, I managed two exchanges with OCZ (so that's three pairs of DIMMs I tried in sequence), and each set went through the same pattern -- worked great then started failing. After the third set, I paid the restocking fee with Newegg and bought form Crucial. I have no idea what the problem was, but OCZ was not interested in figuring it out.
Can we finally put the to bed the idea that being the first (or near first) mover into a specific market is important in carving out a long-term leadership role in that space, and perhaps have people focus instead on making a superior product instead?
Jobs himself had to tell the CEO of OCZ to cut out the crap products.
Good-bye
My own experience with OCZ drives is a 100% failure rate and no support to speak of.
Far more significantly, though, my supplier's experience with them was that they saw such a high proportion of returns that they dropped the brand entirely. My anecdotal data point might have been down to bad luck, but the odds of the pattern my supplier told me about being down to luck would be tiny.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The article quotes the CEO as saying the company is struggling due to "capital constraints". Then right below that, "This has been a common refrain. OCZ reports lower sales, it blames a shortage of NAND." Does the author truly not understand the difference between a shortage of cash to fund ongoing operations, and a shortage of parts?
Regardless, I don't see their departure from the scene as a great loss. Their spotty reputation for quality and customer service has caused me to avoid their products in general, and has apparently come back to bite them in the ass. The only sad part is that they might take PC Power and Cooling (one of the premier PSU manufacturers from back in the day, which OCZ acquired a few years ago) down with the ship.
My supplier exchanged my broken OCZ drive whithout even testing it to a bigger one, as they were out of stock for the particular model.
But the support from OCZ doesn't seem bad at all in comparison with any other electronics manufacturer, IMHO. Better even, they have a nice informative website. What sort of support do people expect from their SSD vendor, and what sort of support does their competition offer?
As a former service manager to a laptop ODM/Integrator, their RMA process sucks, and our MTBF with their devices in custom laptops was drastically lower on every model. When you are dealing with gamers and power users that want to spend 2000-3000 dollars on a laptop, the last thing you need is faulty hardware weeks out of the box AND a 2-3 week + turnaround with OEM direct RMA's.
If it's not broken, let's fix it till it is.
There's an even better reason why nobody wants to sell flash to OCZ -- they've tainted the entire SSD industry so badly with their crap drives, no reputable manufacturer of flash wants to have its good name tarnished by association with them.
A lot of OCZ's problems were self-inflicted, with Sandforce's active complicity.
For example, Sandforce's engineers came up with an ugly, performance-killing hack that allowed the drive to avoid corruption if it were powered-down mid-write so they could officially claim that the ultracapacitor was "optional" in "cost-sensitive applications". OCZ built drives without the ultracap, then had Sandforce furnish them with firmware that DISABLED THAT SAFETY MEASURE to avoid killing their drives' write performance in benchmarks.
Mark my words. If OCZ doesn't go bankrupt on its own accord, they're eventually going to get put out of business by a class-action lawsuit like the one that nailed HP almost 20 years ago. I'm talking about the one where HP's management intentionally ignored their engineers, and sold CD burners that didn't have enough RAM to buffer a complete track & instead depended upon Windows to feed them a steady stream of data with a degree of lockstep precision that Windows could neither promise nor reliably sustain even though their own engineers told them it couldn't work reliably, and was GUARANTEED to turn at least 5-20% of discs burned into coasters (back when a blank CD cost SEVERAL DOLLARS).
HP's engineers DID have a way to allow the drives to be reliably used without the buffer... write the .iso file to a FAT16 volume, then boot directly into DOS from a floppy to do the burning. However, like OCZ's management (who wanted the performance of an ultracap-protected drive, without the cost of the ultracap itself), HP's management wanted a cheap drive that could burn CDs under Windows, even if it meant they had to knowingly LIE about its ability to actually DO it.
warranty claims :D
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
No, I had the same exact experience with OCZ RAM. I'm pretty sure you can count "anecdotal" as "a data point" in this case.
I tried 3 sets of DDR3 RAM when I built a PC for my dad a few years ago. The first one was OCZ, and memtest+ showed that it had 1300-ish errors. I returned it for a new package of the same SKU, and memtest+ turned up 11000-ish (yes, that's an extra zero in there!) errors for that set.
The third set was Corsair. No errors, but it was about $30 more for the same amount of RAM. Now, Corsair is down to the old OCZ price on DDR3, but this was a few years ago.
Shortly after that incident, Microcenter stopped carrying OCZ RAM. They didn't do that just because of my experience.
Several years ago, my first SSD drive was OCZ, and I found out some time later that once filled more than half full, the drive started stuttering (data wise), becoming notably much slower than a hdd drive when writing and it was due to OCZ using a cheap and shitty controller. No fixing it, since it was garbage by design. For a little more money, I could have gotten a quality drive from someone else. And that's I did, and I swore off OCZ forever.
At one point in the past few years, one of OCZ's popular SSD lines had a 20% failure rate. Most of their other products have consistently been about double to triple the failure rate of everyone else's.
Jobs himself had to tell the CEO of OCZ to cut out the crap products.
A link would help back that statement. It would also make inroads on countering the whole "cult of Steve Jobs's personality" label that Apple users don't understand why they can't shake. Else what you stated comes out as "do you not recall the iScriptures? The LORD commanded the heathens at OCZ, but they did not obey, and thus their business was torn asunder by His divine might, and His followers celebrated the power of their rightful LORD by buying more iPhones and iPads, as is His will. This is the word of Jobs, Sosumi."
I think this is the SSD market maturing. For a while, Intel had good, but expensive drives. Then Intel stagnated for a while, as OCZ aimed to be the performance leader, but firmware issues and failed drives burned a bunch of us. Fast forward to today, and we see Samsung being very price aggressive with fast drives that are reliable. That's a perfect storm for OCZ.
Customer service was so bad, that I couldn't hear a word of their marketing.
Place nail here >+
Same here. OCZ has been awful as far as failure rates. I've had three of them die on me. Never again.
I've never had experience with their SSD drives. I have, however, had experience with their RAM and power supplies, and after those experiences I avoided their SSDs like the plague...
Ditto with my local computer store, the failure rate was so high they dropped them completely. I don't think they'll even let you special order them now.
I did look for a citation, both before and after my post but came up empty.
Good-bye
I do remember a few years back OCZ was in the process of trying to get a contract with some manufacturer such as Apple, HP, Dell, etc. but the company decided not to sign the agreement after they saw the negative feedback being left for OCZ products. Someone had said that when OCZ had left all of their other products and went to SSD-only they were heavily relying on that contract.
This goes for OCZ, Corsair, Razer... They bet on male teenager gamer hype, not quality.
https://dalgamotor.wordpress.com/ - Elektronik beyinlere ozgurluk asisi (Turkish)
Everyones SSD stuttered back then, save for Intels. Search for Marvel SSD controller stuttering and you'll find almost every brand! The early controllers were garbage..
GP is fully correct. Every OCZ product I've ever had has failed, often dramatically, and OCZ's "support" was laughable. I've had public exchanges with OCZ execs where they dismissed concerns about device quality and ignored issues. They're reaping what they sowed here.
The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
I hope PC Power and Cooling comes out of this OK too. As a power supply guy I liked the fact that they printed out test reports and their products were built like tanks.
Mod me down with all of your hatred, and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Great point, hopefully that division doesn't sink with the ship. Assuming they're still the best and OCZ didn't screw it up since they bought them.
I still have three PCPCs running 24/7 going on 4 years now. Worth every penny.
Agreed. Maybe I've been lucky. I've got 4 of their drives in two different machines. No problems at all & yes they are very fast.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
Hell it don't take Steve Jobs to know OCZ is shit, just talk to any system builder. i have several gamer customers and they ALL ended up getting burned by OCZ at least once. I'd tell them "Look at the reviews, they are burning folks" but all they cared about was their rank on the boards...well they all ended up with paperweights. OCZ is a classic example of "treat customers like shit and watch them dry up".
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
before my warranty runs out...
To be fair, I've only had one pair of Corsair DIMMs fail, ever. That one was because a power supply failed and shorted the motherboard and RAM as a result. less than 5 minutes on a phone call to Corsair and I had an RMA number. I even told them exactly what happened, I think they even sent a postage paid return shipping label. I now have 3 Corsaird Power Supplies in use (one for almost 3years, the other 2 less than 2 months) no issues with any of them yet.
Oh, and I'm 34. I'm more than happy to pay a premium if the Quality and Customer Service back up the price.
I'd not put corsair in the same bucket as the other two. Their RAM, for instance, will not spontaneously combust. The other two... yeah, you don't have to look very far to see that they have the build quality of white branded parts.
It's a problem when you look for, say, mechanical keyboards. Even companies that used to make good stuff, like das, now have cut costs so that you are going to get more life out of a random membrane keyboard.
My experience with all drives, solid state and spinning, is a 100% failure rate... eventually.
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
I three have a Vertex 4 that has been fine. I've written at least a few dozen terabytes to it (hell, it's my swap drive), wear indicator says 98% life remaining, and it's nearly full most of the time (~90G/128G). Still does random read/write at 300+M/s. Maybe it helps that I run fstrim to update the free block list from a nightly cron job?
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
He isn't passing the buck, as far as I see. He's explaining that after selling so many systems, their failure rates were terrible, and so was their OEM RMA. He's not saying "fuck the gamers, I have their money and hahahaha", he's saying "Their OEM supply was terrible, and here's why we don't use them anymore (or hate having to use them now, he's not specific as to whether they dropped OCZ)".
As a data point of one, I'm still running with the 4GB of OCZ ram I bought from newegg (I think) in 2009 and have had no problems. The reviews on that product were also decent.
After reading reviews of their SSD drives, though, I'd avoid those.
I guess the message here (if any) is, pay attention to the reviews on the product. If people say it's crap, it probably is.
I've also heard that their new lines are better, but by definition they don't have a long track record yet to know whether they'll stay that way.
In any case, there are other brands with much more consistent technical track records and much better customer service who also have well-reviewed recent products available.
This is the trouble with cutting corners and mistreating customers and damaging your business reputation as a result: it's a trap that your business will probably never escape, no matter what you do later. Your brand becomes toxic, and as you can see from this thread, no-one's going to shed many tears when your business eventually fails.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
We rarely use them. As to the supply chain/RMA process, the owner of the business requires the RMA to handled by the OEM and maintained barely enough JIT inventory to keep systems going out. He makes money in volume, thus I would spend many hours a week dealing with irate customers that did not want to wait weeks for their replacement hardware while OCZ pulled their head out. Incidentally, their RMA process was the same no matter what the supplier, so I was always fighting with the customer, the owner, and the OEM at the same time. Since the owner was the sole person in charge of the supply chain, I was in an untenable position, and left the job after 9 months for one much better, with a much larger established company-not one that is a primarily internet based reseller with a skeleton crew of actual employees.
If it's not broken, let's fix it till it is.
Burned? A few people I know had OCZ drives that were dead on arrival but they were replaced without drama instead of the customers being "burned".
I bought a couple of OCZ drives over the last few years for different computers and they all work fine. I'm not worried that they will fail and wipe my data because I only put programs and operating system stuff there (as shouldn't all of us here on /.?). I never bought the 'high end' gamer stuff. My data goes on a HDD and when I compile stuff and install it, it then goes on the SSD for fast performance. When I am working on something distributed from SSD it is backed up online through a version controll system so I don't lose anything major in the event of a fire or disk failure. For servers, you should have an RAID array of SSDs and the OCZs have been cheaper, so you should expect that they might fail -- but this should not impact what you do.
But their overvoltage ram was so garbage, and their tech support process was so awful, that i have personally steered 10s of customers away from them.
Never again would i buy ocz and looks like i was right.
-
Every single SSD benchmark web site has been singing praises over the OCZ SSDs for years now and I fell for the bait a bit like everyone else because OCZ's costs per GB were the lowest while performance the highest. I already bought an Intel X25-M 80GB G1 drive and have been happy with it but I recommended these drives to friends who were cash strapped as HDD replacements only to have 3 out of 4 OCZ Vertex 1's and 2's fail within a year and pissed off friends.
I still have one OCZ 40GB sitting in a box unopened that I don't wish to use for anything at all. Might have to take it out and shoot it because nobody on eBay wanted to buy it.
One PBX running Linux Asterisk for a company that I helped out started failing and corrupting their OS drive and they sent me the whole box. Luckily it was usable enough that I was able to buy an Intel V-25X 40GB SSD and do a disk copy while skipping errors and trash that OCZ Vertex 40GB. Then do a whole distro-upgrade that over-wrote pretty much the whole OS and all the corrupted packages and files but kept the config files that were uncorrupted intact saving their PBX server. Lucked out with that one.
I had an OCZ 750VA power supply that was reviewed and touted as the best of that review but after a few years my computer started experiencing strange errors, crashes, freezes, and I narrowed them down to the +12V rail instability and drops. Turned out that all the plugs were on a single 12V shared rail and the components and capacitors in the power supply must have been crap so they were wearing out and dropping voltage during load spikes. Replaced it with a Corsair HX750 modular power supply and have been happy and stable on a new system since for twice the number of years as that OCZ power supply.
Intel SSD Forever...?
Coincidentally, when I was searching for a new SSD I was thinking that the industry matured but when I looked at the recently past price and performance leader the Samsung 840 there were way too many negative posts on various retailer and forums regarding these drives failing without warning. Seemed like a similar situation to what I saw with OCZ.
I don't like paying the huge premiums for Intel SSD but it turns out that they are what I have been buying for 3 generations now, G1 40 & 80GB, G2 40GB & 80GB, G3 335 240GB. I don't know if this trend is going to end in the future.
Pity PC Power & Cooling is apparently going down with the OCZ ship. For the better part of a decade, I always heard PP&C PSUs were the best and they had prices to match that rep. I could never hope to afford one.
And then OCZ bought them, and curiously, the positive reviews became harder to find and the off-the-cuff remarks ("Hey so and so is a good brand of whatever, check it out!") stopped entirely.
Suddenly the prices had dropped into the normal range and now a 760 watt PP&C PSU is like $60. And you get an AMEX rebate card with it. The PSU itself is just some outsourced part they got from who knows where.
Sig for hire.
First time I've ever seen anyone on slashdot complain about something supporting Linux but not Windows.
I bet the same OCZ tech is getting another laugh today from reading your post.
I disagree. Corsair products are almost always of high build quality and reliability. They use reputable OEMs to manufacture their high end products (Flextronics/Seasonic for their PSUs) and have some of the best cases around. I wouldn't trade my Obsidian 800D for anything except for a 900D.
who designed it, name names, and the retards, or are they unemployed now?
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Yeah... even at he local Micro Center, which had a big OCZ display set up, I had a salesperson tell me he'd recommend "almost anything other than OCZ" when I was asking about SSDs!
They had so much RMA and customer dissatisfaction, they basically only wanted to sell them to people who grabbed them off the shelves on their own and didn't ask any questions.
Everyones SSD stuttered back then, save for Intels. Search for Marvel SSD controller stuttering and you'll find almost every brand! The early controllers were garbage..
On the plus side, if you were stuck with a Marvel controller, that did mean that you didn't have a JMicron controller. Those are shit.
Even companies that used to make good stuff, like das, now have cut costs so that you are going to get more life out of a random membrane keyboard.
Das doesn't make the switches; Cherry does. Nearly every mechanical keyboard manufacturer these days uses Cherry MX switches, which are rated for 50 million cycles. Whether you're buying a mechanical keyboard from Das, WASD, Ducky, Razer, or any of a host of others, you're getting the exact same 50-million cycle switches.
In contrast, a membrane keyboard's switches are generally only rated for 3-5 million cycles.
To use the obligatory car analogy, it's like complaining that because the car's manufacturer didn't put in a premium audio system, the engine will only last for 10,000 miles.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
At one point in the past few years, one of OCZ's popular SSD lines had a 20% failure rate. Most of their other products have consistently been about double to triple the failure rate of everyone else's.
Given that cheap-ass SSDs and cheap-ass RAM were two of their big lines (with PSUs and various other gamer-jockey bits and pieces floating around at the edges from time to time), and given that they didn't own any fabs, it will be very interesting to see what, if any, effect their demise would have on the market for flash and ram silicon...
With something like a DIMM or an SSD, there isn't a huge amount to go wrong mechanically (unless your manufacturing process is unbelievably dire), nor are there a whole lot of components, aside from relatively pricey silicon, to shave pennies on. This is somewhat less like PSUs or cases, or most mechanical gear, where costs are more evenly distributed across the assembly, and you can be sneakier about shaving a nickle here and a penny there, which leaves room for companies that are good at doing so (and produce products that feel pretty cheesy; but work), and companies that aren't (who produce products that just fail a lot).
This leaves one inclined to wonder if OCZ was getting good prices on the expensive silicon by serving as a 'sink' for the actual silicon manufacturer's dubious-grade flash and DRAM. Unless yields are absolutely beautiful across the industry, there are going to be some B-list dice rolling off the line, and almost any discount that doesn't involve writing them off as scrap and grinding them up will be more profitable than the alternative. If that is in fact the case, OCZ may die; but the strong incentives for somebody to find a use for marginal-grade material will remain. Will some other off-brand(s) spring up? Will one or more controller design outfits attempt to turn the situation to their advantage by producing a controller specially suited to taking a larger quantity of lousy flash or DRAM and hiding that behind an abstraction of a smaller quantity of actually-reliable stuff(all controllers do some degree of that, but apparently not enough to save OCZ products)?
I used a handful of OCZ vertex 2's (back then it was like $3 per GB) in a couple of servers (in enterprise setting) for almost three years. Still running.
I also own four vertex 4's in a RAID 10 setup, all four drive still running after a year.
Either there is a incredible bad luck streak, or there is some abuse going on. The first and only SSD failure I have come across is a 120GB Intel X25-m.
New Economic Perspectives
Wrong list. I bought OCZ ram once and it failed memory test as well as it crashed while booting. I had it replaced with the warranty and the new one had a failure somewhere else. That's a 100% failure rate for everything I bought from OCZ, which is simply not good enough. On the other hand I never had any problems with Corsair and have bought from them multiple times. This experience appears to fit the picture of what you can find online from other people, though the 100% failure rate is a bit extreme.
I usually tell the rep right off the bat that we've got a number of whatever part I'm calling on around the office and have already verified the failure using a known good device/part.
Doesn't always work, but the majority of the time I get someone on the phone who understands the concept, it's gotten me to the "here's your RMA" part of the call pretty quickly.
Corsair are great! I have bought many of their products and they have never let me down.
What you have provided anecdotal data. By posting it on slashdot you've helped create a statistic.
No one here is going to scream at you "OMG ANECDOTE" because you say your OCZ drive failed, because that seems to be everyone's experience.
Intel always made better SSDs. My OCZ SSD died, I replaced it with an Intel one that just keeps on going. But then Acer make cheap rubbish that falls apart easily and they stay profitable. There is normally more money in the low end than the top end.
Do watch the SSD market. I noticed that the local Frys is looking to all but purge their
inventory.
Is there a price jump, a price cut or some new stuff hitting the market?
I was all set to buy a SSD disk but the prices did not make sense and
the display astoundingly bollixed and confused.
My current plan is to move to a SSD and the new AC network links.
I can have large storage on my router/ cloud/ drive/ dropbox/ resource
and a light quick laptop with modest storage. The speed of SSD devices
is getting to be a serous game changer at home and at work.
But these OCZ folks seem to have stepped in it badly.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
"A few dozen terabytes"? Is that per year? My computer is lightly used, imho, and dumpe2fs(8) says
...
Filesystem created: Mon Feb 1 08:50:40 2010
Lifetime writes: 87 TB
Not an SSD, of course. I want my disks to last a little longer yet.
That could only be the case if you deliberately run everything you buy until it breaks.
Even as a single individual I have had experience of owning probably over 100 hard drives over 30 years. The vast majority were still working correctly when I end-of-lifed them, after 2, 5, or in some cases 10 years.
actually, if the odds are 2:1 of a drive failing, the odds of all 16 failing are still 2:1.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
If you couldn't find a citation then maybe you shouldn't have fucking said it.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
I got a vertex 2 that's ran for 1.8 years without a hitch.
that doesn't change the fact though that some models from them suffered 50%+ return rates(links available in other comments).
I however don't know what kind of vertex2 this is that I got since apparently they changed the device without changing the model name at some point, "yay".
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
If OCZ making crap was not their fault but them getting backstabbed by their suppliers they better start gathering proof and taking appropriate action.
I doubt it though.
Intel did the right thing and deployed their SSD upgrade software [intel.com] as a bootable CD.
I think that was the best way to do it last decade but it's a bit like an updated version of when every flash update required a 1.44MB floppy. CD drives are being phased out. Lots of machines don't come with CDs anymore including the one I'm using to type this. While I have a USB CD drive if I need it, I break it out *maybe* twice a year. Usually if I need drivers or software I get them online. If I need to take software with me I put it on a flash drive or an online storage service. I'm having a hard time remembering the last time I actually burned a CD.
Flash drives are a better option most of the time since they are smaller, reusable, repurpose-able, and take up less wasted space in my closet.
i'm just going over the batch of OCZs that we had to pull from locations all over the world. the cost of the recall was far in excess of the cost of the drives. over 200 of them. if you have an OCZ Vertex drive with firmware revision 1.11, it *will* fail spectacularly. all you need to do is set up 64 sets of parallel writes, run them for 10 minutes, and you *will* get data corruption. you can do this in a shell script (i used python) by spawning "cp -aux" of a directory hierarchy with 1500 subdirectories and 3,000 small files. 64 parallel sets of copying (and then deleting) i.e. if you do around 1.5 million file-directory creates and deletes you are *guaranteed* to have data corruption.
the strange thing: the very first Vertex OCZs released were absolutely fine. what i learned just yesterday was that *even* with a drive that has been consistently failing, if you downgrade its firmware to revision 1.7 *it becomes absolutely fine*.
the problem that we have is that upgrading units in-the-field when the firmware upgrade system provided by OCZ is an ISOLINUX cd image with FreeDOS and a firmware-flash program is going to be rather tricky when none of the systems have a screen let alone a keyboard.
by contrast, we have somewhere around 500 Intel 320s installed world-wide. there have only ever been 3 failures.
for the selection of the new drive (Intel 320s are end-of-life) i'm endeavouring to replicate that test system which was reported on slashdot to have destroyed 12 different SSDs within under an hour per drive. i have managed to destroy one already: Crucial M4. it took 2500 power-cycle interruptions (the program's still in development) so the M4 failed in under 24 hours. so don't get that one. still on the list: Innodisk 3-MP Sata Slim, Toshiba's new SSD, and Intel's new S3500.
the toshiba i can already tell you, if you interrupt its power you will find that, on power-up, some of the outstanding write requests will *not* have been actioned. this is partly good news: it means that the drive is detecting that it doesn't have power, so doesn't risk corrupting the drive. i'm looking forward to properly testing the 3-MP because they're cheap, small, and the datasheet has, unlike any other manufacturer, a heck of a lot of details about how they actually do power-loss protection. most other manufacturers don't even bother to mention power-loss protection, that's if you can find a proper datasheet at all.
Just an idea of how the company is run. Purchased an OCZ thumb drive. Lost the receipt. The thumb drive is clearly labeled and one of their products - it is supposed to have a lifetime warranty. I've owned many thumb drives and washed and dried plenty - not that I'd recommend that- and virtually all of them still work. This particular thumb drive had a short life plugged into a not so critical server. When it died - thought great - lifetime warranty - Ill get it replaced. Not a chance without receipt. I find this unacceptable w/ a lifetime warranty and a product that they can plain see is theirs. I WILL NEVER BUY A OCZ product. Junk!
Oh, I don't suspect that they were backstabbed; but that they knowingly purchased marginal-quality goods at discounted prices in order to meet their own aggressive pricing schemes.
I can back this up. I had seven OCZ drives in various customer computers during their firmware debacle. One bricked after two weeks. OCZ claimed there was nothing wrong with their drives. Then they released 2.11 firmware to fix the imaginary issue. The forums filled with complaints that it had INCREASED the number of BSODs. OCZ said they can't reproduce what we were all seeing and experiencing, but released version 2.15 IIRC which did fix the issue. However... The CS was exceptionally rude through the entire time. The firmware update could not be applied in a Windows environment, even though other vendors do manage to do this. The drive needed to be pulled and connected to a different PC as a non-boot drive and updated from there. And when I tried to do this using my old workhorse computer, the update failed. OCZ support told me that my motherboard and chipset were not compatible. (MSI P35-Neo2 FR, not an uncommon board.) The issue was rare but not rare enough, and if it bricked you lost everything, no recourse. Backups of course, but the drive was toast. So was my time. I returned all drives to Microcenter and ordered fresh stock from Newegg. OCZ can burn in hell.
I'm not arguing with any of the anecdotal data posted here in the comments, just sharing my experience...
I've been running 8 vertex 3's in a raid-5 array for a while now (4 for over a year, 4 more added less than a year ago), and haven't had any problems with them. My thinking has been that they're cheap SSD's and having staggered the purchase of them, I'm unlikely to have more than one fail on me at the same time.
I do not know if I'm lucky, or my usage patterns and hardware/software set-up have skirted many of the issues associated with these drives, but I have been watching the array closely, and haven't been seeing any issues.
All of that being said, its unlikely that I will be replacing the drives in the array with more OCZ drives as they fail.
Am i writing a fucking paper here? It was a vague recollection that i thought i would add in. What is astonishing is that you got +5 insightful for this bullshit.
Good-bye
Fabricated and unsupported are VASTLY different things.
Good-bye
To me the real bitch is when they bricked there was ZERO way to wipe the drives and their CS would give no guarantees as to what the fuck would happen to the drive once it was sent back so my gamer customers ended up just throwing them in the trash rather than risk some Chinese refurb worker having their bank details. Needless to say I washed my hands of OCZ gear and never looked back.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
OCZ aside; when we procure Dell PowerEdge servers for the SMB market, we don't actively select the brand of drive. What we do select is capacity and performance and weigh that against cost.
Now you may be asking is "why"? Simple. 1: We trust Dell's selection in their PowerEdge lineup. 2: We never run a server without an active warranty. Drive fails in an array; we get it replaced the same or following day. No problemo.
Life is not for the lazy.
Are you?
What you're implying by your blatant insult is if hard disk 1 has probability of failure 1/1000 and so does disk 2, then the probability of both failing is 1/1,000,000. That assumes failures are statistically independent, but they’re not. You can’t just multiply probabilities like that unless the failures are uncorrelated. Wrongly assuming independence is a common error in applying probability, particularly inside of a computer case, maybe the most common error.
When a company builds a RAID, they may grab four or five disks that came off the assembly line together. If one of these disks has a slight flaw that causes it to fail after say 10,000 hours of use, it’s likely they all do. This is not just a theoretical possibility. Companies have observed batches of disks all failing around the same time.
Using disks made by competing companies would significantly decrease the correlation in failure probabilities. The failures will always be somewhat correlated. For one thing, different manufacturers use similar materials and processes. Also, regardless of where the drives come from, they end up in the same box, all subject to the same environmental factors. If one drive fails due to overheating, then the same failure condition will likely affect other drives *in the same box*.
To bring it to a real-world level, something you *might* grasp: the odds against winning the Lottery jackpot in Britain is 14,000,000:1 (roughly). If you bought 14 million tickets to cover every possible outcome, your odds of having ONE winning ticket are STILL 14,000,000:1 against. This is also not a theoretical possibility, it is mathematical certainty.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
ok. Flip a coin: the odds of it landing on one given side is 2:1 against. Flip a coin (I'm assuming the same coin?) again. The odds of it landing on the same one given side are still 2:1 against. The variables have not changed. You don't double the odds every time you flip; the coin still only has two sides.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Again that is a completely different use case than what killed OCZ which is the consumer market. Lets face it, with VMs you just don't buy the hardware that you used to so its the consumer market where the money is and OCZ burned that bridge a long time ago. Buggy firmware, shitty CS, they made every mistake you can make and THAT is why their sales are crap.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I wonder how many of those 50% didn't disable or move virtual memory / swap.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
OCZ's drives don't fail at an any higher rate than, say, WD's first generation SATA 3.0 drives, so look at the bright side: If the two vendors were sports cars, your use of OCZ SSDs would ensure that people emitted the proper "Wow!" when they read how fast you were going before your brakes failed and you hit the tree.
(lolll...personally, I bought some Vertex IIs, some Agility 2s...and stopped.)
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Well, no actually. You need the same amount of storage, but not spindles; which isn't the same thing. When you run VMs from a server, you benefit from data consolidation vs. each machine running on bare metal.
With the advent of BYOD, throw-away consumer electronics, and thin client machines booting from VM client images; the days of consumer drives needed in office desktops will become more and more sparse. I can only imagine the consumer PC market will follow a similar downward trend (sans VM and thin clients). Save for those specialty gaming rigs and workstation class machines used in drafting, manufacturing, and GIS (oil and gas industry).
Life is not for the lazy.
Every OCZ drive I've ever bought has not functioned properly out of the box. One of them worked after a firmware upgrade (and has been working for several years.) The other never worked and I returned it to the vendor.
I've never had to upgrade the firmware on a hard drive before. The first one I wrote off as "It's a new product, there are some bugs." After the second one, I was done. If I bought a car and had to load a special utility and buy a special cable to flash the ECU before the car would run reliably, I wouldn't have bought the car in the first place.
Exactly, you can keep the data in a single pool which the entire office has access to thus ending all the duplicates on desktops and with Ms and BYOD there really isn't a need for a full desktop anymore. This is why the consumer market is where more and more of sales are coming from as the consumer an't (yet) do such data consolidation (although ChromeOS is pushing it), not to mention the privacy issues since Joe Consumer can't run his own cloud yet.
In any case without consumer sales you are dead meat and OCZ burned that bridge, no coming back for them.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I did look for a citation, both before and after my post but came up empty.
In general, when you actively fail to prove the source of a quote, yet still use it as an assertion - That counts as lying.
Jus' sayin'.
*Sigh*, time-wasting pedantry here, but if you believe you're telling the truth you're not lying. You have to intend to deceive to do that. If you have a recollection of a quote or assertion you saw somewhere, can't find it, but believe it to be true and repeat it, it's not a lie, even if in fact it's untrue. You can be mistaken without being a liar.
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
>Fabricated and unsupported are VASTLY different things.
Without a citation, we can't tell the difference.