OCZ SSDs - Why are they so bad?

jsarwar469

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Dec 26, 2013
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Why do they have such a high fail rate? Ive never had an issue when it come with SSD but maybe because I didnt keep them for long enough. This time around my OCZ iis almost a year old and Ive been hearing thats when they die out on you. Should I be worried? Start backing up my Data?
 
It is possible to poorly design and manufacture anything, regardless of how reliable similar items may be.

Some of the old OCZ drives are what happens when you cut too many corners.

You should always backup your data, regardless of what type of drive you have.
 
The old ones suffered from Sandforce firmware problems. Particularly ones from 2011-2012 (or whatever year the Vertex 2 generation was). The new ones (Vertex 3 and after) suffer from the same typical rates as other SSDs, more or less.
 
Well I was surprised to hear OCZ could make such unreliable product. Ive always bought their products and have always been happy with them until now. I still remember when the 7600GT came out and I had bought the OCZ one since it had life time warranty, Now Im guessing none of their products have life time warranty and kinda explains why lol.

If this fails on me Im doomed. Gonna start backing up my data! Thanks!
 
I have been running my OCZ vertex4 without any issues since the day it was released. I also have about 50-60 vertex 2 drives in client computers and have only had 1 fail over the last 3 years. Obviously they had some poor QC on the drives.....im nervous due to all the reported claims, im sure ill start to experience issues at some point. and yeah you should be backing up regardless of what kind of drive you have.
 
Don't let the statistics confuse you. OCZ SSDs have the highest failure rate of any major brand, by far. But still, even the worst models of OCZ SSDs have return rates of about 50%, and most of the OCZ models are in the 5 to 10% range. As a comparison, the best brands, like Samsung, have failure rates well below 1%.

So it is reasonable to assume that the majority of OCZ SSDs do not fail prematurely. It is not surprising that you have one that is working.

But when making purchases, I usually try to choose a product that has one of the lowest failure rates. That is definitely not OCZ.
 
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You should always backup your data, regardless of what type of drive you have.

Agreed. Any drive can die at any time. If you care about your data make sure you have backups.
 
Gee, I wonder why they went bankrupt. Shitty company, shitty products, there is no why. It's just the way things were.
 
Don't let the statistics confuse you. OCZ SSDs have the highest failure rate of any major brand, by far. But still, even the worst models of OCZ SSDs have return rates of about 50%, and most of the OCZ models are in the 5 to 10% range. As a comparison, the best brands, like Samsung and Intel, have failure rates well below 1%.

Source for your stats?

Or did you just make those up?
 
Source for your stats?

Or did you just make those up?

There was a study released a few weeks ago on the failure rates of motherboards, SSDs, and hard drives. Those numbers aren't made up, though I can't recall where they were from at the moment.

In any case, OCZ's newer SSDs only have a failure rate slightly higher than that of other brands. It's the Octane and Petrol series I believe that skyrocketed their overall failure rates.
 
OCZ ssd's did suffer from poor reliability and random failure but it was mainly the original Vertex 1, 2 and the Plus (before f/w 3.55 was rolled out) that made the failure figures big. Vertex 3 did have issues at the start till the firmware's started rolling out to fix the said issues.
 
I just killed the Vortex 3 that they sent me as a replacement when my Vortex 1 died. Numbers are approximate.

There are great theories out there why the controllers inside these drives die so quickly. I haven't read them in detail, I just won't jump on SSDs for quite a while more.
 
I haven't read them in detail, I just won't jump on SSDs for quite a while more.

Why blame other companies for the faults of a company that no longer exists? I mean SSDs from Samsung or Intel are significantly more reliable than hard drives.
 
The old ones suffered from Sandforce firmware problems. Particularly ones from 2011-2012 (or whatever year the Vertex 2 generation was). The new ones (Vertex 3 and after) suffer from the same typical rates as other SSDs, more or less.


The other part I'd agree with some others, that OCZ was a Enthusiast hardcore, bleeding edge, style of company. They loved firmware because it gave them so many options often times to tweak performance. The problem is nobody wants to screw around when it comes to storage and they had some major issues with their firmware.

I have a hard time taking any company seriously when you needed to update the firmware to get the listed performance out of the box that's advertised ON THE BOX. They were the big fish at one point, but they really are a example of being so successful you drove yourself to destruction. Instead of focusing on consistency and dropping prices per gig, they tried to sell a drive with slightly higher read/writes/iops for a premium. Didn't help that you were taking a 50/50 risk with just about any drive from any line working correctly as advertised out of the box.
 
i'm not at all surprised to find this thread so readily in the ssd section on page 1. This seams as good a place as any to vent some anger.

FUCK YOU, OCZ!

i just had another OCZ unexplainably die on me today. Vector 256. spent several hours now re-kajiggering my workhorse machine to work on a 500 gb wd hard drive and with all the stuff i run it has been painful waiting for things to come up. and since their tech support / rma dept. is out today for the holiday, i dont know when i will actually get around to RMA'ing this thing. However, one thing i do know, is that for all the times i bought ocz in the past, and for how many of them have failed just beyond their warranty period (and before too), today i did something i should have done all along: bought a samsung 840 pro with a nice 5 year warranty, and when the refurb comes in, it's going on FS/FT.
 
My employer went through quite a few original Z-drives and Denevas. Turns out the spare flash dies were actually small flat pieces of baked feces rather than NAND.

I might be exaggerating slightly, but the failure rates we saw would be explained by baked feces as spare flash dies. Also, no, I was not a part of any purchasing decisions.
 
My employer went through quite a few original Z-drives and Denevas. Turns out the spare flash dies were actually small flat pieces of baked feces rather than NAND.

I might be exaggerating slightly, but the failure rates we saw would be explained by baked feces as spare flash dies. Also, no, I was not a part of any purchasing decisions.

I would think the problem was more to do with the SSD controller and firmware bugs more than bad flash.
 
I would think the problem was more to do with the SSD controller and firmware bugs more than bad flash.

Likely. But when am I going to be able to use the phrase "baked feces" and be on topic again? The drives were very much "If they last a few months, they'll be fine. But expect a replacement or two before then".
 
3/5 of the OCZ SSDs I have owned died on me unexpectedly with 100% life still remaining on their nand. Even when I contacted OCZ for a warranty claim they refused to fix or replace my drive for me. The only other brand drive i've had fail on me is Crucial but at least in that case it was possible to fix the drive myself by just updating the firmware. When the OCZ drives bricked they were impossible for me to fix them on my own.
 
just had another OCZ SSD go bad on me today. All my wife's stuff, gone.
 
3/5 of the OCZ SSDs I have owned died on me unexpectedly with 100% life still remaining on their nand. Even when I contacted OCZ for a warranty claim they refused to fix or replace my drive for me. The only other brand drive i've had fail on me is Crucial but at least in that case it was possible to fix the drive myself by just updating the firmware. When the OCZ drives bricked they were impossible for me to fix them on my own.

My OCZ Vertex 2 died on me last week. The drive disappeared from BIOS and I tried another PC, another SATA cable with no difference. Pretty sure it is the drive. I am about to start the RMA process and then I see your post.

On what ground do they refuse your warranty claim?
 
But of course you had everything backed up so you get to be the hero now, right?!?

fraid not. last backup was october something. good note: most of her more important stuff kept on network drive..

by the way, my vector died last week, and it's stuck in the RMA process right now since they are "waiting for a shipment of new drives to fulfill my replacement"
 
must be similar to the Mushkin Chronos drives I used. I've had 4 our of 5 brick/fail on me :(. Very much made my SSD experiences poor. I just got a Samsung 840EVO 240gb and a Kingston V300 128gb SSD(before I read about the switch in nand type :(_). Hope these last. The Kingston's in my daughters pc and aside from being a bit slower installing larger files/programs it seems fine otherwise.
 
For those that had OCZ SSD failures, were they used in a raid?

I'm still using my same old 90GB Vertex 2 from 2010.. still churning along (and I run my comp 24/7).
 
Ive never seen a need for ssd raid given how fast they are already. Have had several ocz failures, several Kingston hyper x 3k failures, no failures with Kingston ssd v300 (and I've deployed a hundred or more).

For those that had OCZ SSD failures, were they used in a raid?

I'm still using my same old 90GB Vertex 2 from 2010.. still churning along (and I run my comp 24/7).
 
For those that had OCZ SSD failures, were they used in a raid?

I used the two I had for RAID0 and they were so freaking bad that I sold 'um after two days.

The guy who ran OCZ at that time was nothing but a shyster salesman who used deceptive performance testing tactics and confusing model names in an attempt to disguise the fact that some used lower classed NAND but only after he was busted using it in his prime SSDs and being 'outed' on AnandTech by Anand himself.

OCZ is one of two companies I refuse to support, the other being Creative Technology.
 
Still have my Vertex Plus' from sig rig running fine with over 10000 hours since 2011. Had em in raid 0 for OS on my old hexacore 1366 rig.
 
Ive never seen a need for ssd raid given how fast they are already.

The only reason I did it was because I had several 64GB ones lying around and didn't want to spend money on a bigger unit.

Have 2 OCZ SSD's....like Agility 2's that are still working.

OCZ was also open about what they did early on, plus they really pioneered the market in the beginning. So they were pushing the limits of a new (to consumers) technology and they were open about what they were doing. It made it easy to pick on them because you could point to what they said.

Solid State drives matured about 100x faster then platter drives did (platter drives were still terrible reliability even into early 2000's). And I think that having a company like OCZ take the brunt of the heat for that helped companies like Intel see what the market needed and set the bar higher. Within about 2 years, the SSD market ironed out most of the issues that plagued it.
 
OCZ wasn't the greatest at manufacturing (unlike Intel) and they used bleeding-edge firmware from SandForce. That double whammy got them into trouble.

I'm not a SandForce fan. All my SSD's are either Intel or Marvell based. Not one problem.
 
OCZ wasn't the greatest at manufacturing (unlike Intel) and they used bleeding-edge firmware from SandForce. That double whammy got them into trouble.

I'm not a SandForce fan. All my SSD's are either Intel or Marvell based. Not one problem.

Some Intel drives use a Sand Force chip, the difference is that Intel spent a year working on their own custom firmware before releasing anything (Cherryville drives)
 
Some Intel drives use a Sand Force chip, the difference is that Intel spent a year working on their own custom firmware before releasing anything (Cherryville drives)

I avoided those too. Loving my Marvell based 510.
 
I avoided those too. Loving my Marvell based 510.

Fortunately the Intel drives haven't display any of the reliability terribleness that plagues some other SandForce based drives. The fact that it took them over a year just to test and validate firmware shows they took it pretty seriously (and that SandForce had a ton of problems!)
 
I used the two I had for RAID0 and they were so freaking bad that I sold 'um after two days.

The guy who ran OCZ at that time was nothing but a shyster salesman who used deceptive performance testing tactics and confusing model names in an attempt to disguise the fact that some used lower classed NAND but only after he was busted using it in his prime SSDs and being 'outed' on AnandTech by Anand himself.

OCZ is one of two companies I refuse to support, the other being Creative Technology.

Considering how OCZ is now under completely different management, I doubt this really applies to the Toshiba-owned OCZ.
 
The name OCZ is burned forever. If there's a new management and everything, why cling to a name that destroyed so much trust you can never regain? It's strategic nonsense.
 
Fortunately the Intel drives haven't display any of the reliability terribleness that plagues some other SandForce based drives. The fact that it took them over a year just to test and validate firmware shows they took it pretty seriously (and that SandForce had a ton of problems!)

No. That's like saying the fact that it took 3D realms 12 years of development on Duke Nukem Forever proves that they put the effort in to make the best game they could. This just means they took a really long time.
 
Chiming in to say my OCZ Agility 2 is still going strong for 3 years now. So far it's been running 22,673 hrs, with 217 power-on counts, read 28,736 GB and written 8320 GB. That being said, I think I'm going to swoop in and grab Samsung 840 Pro at these low prices just in case..
 
Chiming in to say my OCZ Agility 2 is still going strong for 3 years now. So far it's been running 22,673 hrs, with 217 power-on counts, read 28,736 GB and written 8320 GB. That being said, I think I'm going to swoop in and grab Samsung 840 Pro at these low prices just in case..

Even if you get the 840 pro you should still backup your data just in case..
 
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