OCZ Vertex & Agility Gen 1 40GB SSDs = All 4 Dead

[JakFrost]

OCZ NEVER AGAIN!!!​

Just wanted to add my voice to the choir on the net to say that another OCZ Vertex Gen 1 40GB Solid State Hard Drive is dead.

Below are the units that have died that I purchased or recommended for others. Burned by all of them, even the PBX system I built for friends that had no disk I/O since all was cached in RAM after boot-up. Just got it in FedEx yesterday with corruption and near death, ordered an Intel 320 40GB as a replacement the minute I saw fsch auto check fail with massive inode errors and require a manual fix even though the PBX had almost no disk I/O load and was UPS backed-up.

• OCZ Vertex 40GB (Gen 1) = Dead @ 6-months - Started with bad sectors, now inaccessible from BIOS.
• OCZ Agility 40GB (Gen 1) = Dead @ 1-year - Recommended to friends as an inexpensive SSD for Windows XP, 1-year life and bad sectors then corruption and death.
• OCZ Vertex 40GB (Gen 1) = Dead @ 1-year - Windows XP desktop system my friend was using lightly, bad sectors, corruption, unbootable.
• OCZ Vertex 40GB (Gen 1) = Dead @ 2-years - Lightly accessed drive on a Linux PBX 2-phone system, bad sectors, corruption, near death.

I still have my Intel X25-M 80GB Gen 1 drive from my desktop now working in my wife's laptop for 3-years without any issues or slowdowns. I have a 80GB G2 at work for 1.5-years, and a G3 (aka 320) at home and another in two of my co-workers computers at home. All have been rock solid without any issues or errors. I don't hear any user complaints about these either.

I have a brand new, shrink wrapped, unopened OCZ Vertex 40GB Gen 1 in a box that I tried to sell on eBay and nobody bought it a few months ago, even for a $40 starting price, not a single taker. I have another one of these Death Star drives in a PBX system that I have in the house just sitting around waiting for me to play around with new Linux PBX software and now I won't even bother using it and will order another Intel 320 40GB for myself. Not sure if I should even try to pawn these terrible OCZ Vertex drives on anyone on eBay since it will just bring them possible pain in the future. Might just trash them.

A few months ago I'm glad that I got the Intel 320 for my main system instead of the OCZ Vertex 3 that was out of stock at the time everywhere otherwise I'd be getting screwed in 6-months to a year with a possible failure looking at how those Gen 1 Vertexes did.

 

[thenightman4u]

I wonder if all of the issues stem from them being Generation 1. I see that SSD's have came a long way since then. I hear that since OZC released Firmware 2.15 it solved a lot of issues they were having, just a thought

 

[jwcalla]

Wow... what kind of NAND flash were they using back then? Bob's NAND Company?

 

[DonDon]

I had a 240 Gig Vertex 2 die on me after only a couple of months. RMA'd it ok, but I moved it to my work laptop that I carry a spare drive with me for it, just in case.

I have 4 X 30 gig 1st gen Solids that are still working. I also have an original Vertex and an Agility, both 60 gig that are still kicking.

I am thinking I will avoid OCZ for a while. They are a bit too far out on the bleeding edge for my tastes. They do drive innovation and price though. I believe they are the major reason why the Intel drives have gotten faster and cheaper.

Don