ocz vertex...has the situation improved?

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nocloud

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These things have a pretty terrible rep. Prolific DOAs and bricking after a few weeks/months of use.

For people who keep up with the current status of SSD's, have these problems gone away or is it still best to avoid these drives?

I know the Vertex 2 series was quite unreliable, are the Vertex 3's any better?
 
Brahmzy said:
Vertex 3's are solid so far...
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Have to disagree with you on this, at least in my case.

The Vertex 3 Max IOPS I purchased lasted 2 days before it became a brick. The drive was not ''RIGHT" from the beginning. I had a system that had been running a Vertex LE for over a year without a problem. I tried to replace the LE with the Vertex 3 and had nothing but trouble before it bricked on me. Drive would not boot at first at 6GB, and when I finally did get it to boot, I could not backup the drive or run an anti virus scan without a system freeze or BSOD. When it finally bricked on my I was attempting to run a full virus scan on the drive when I had a BSOD, after that the drive was not recognized in the BIOS and I could not access it. Tried it on 2 systems and had the same results.

Also, check the reviews on NE and check the OCZ forum. There has been mixed reviews on both sites. If you get a "GOOD" drive performance is great any everything works, but there are also quiet a few that are having the same and similar problems as I did. I think it will take a couple of firmware upgrades for these drives to be reliable. Unfortunately NE has a replacement only warranty on this drive or I would cut my losses and wait awhile.
 
I just bought a Vertex 3 for my new Dell XPS L702x and it has been great, aside from an AHCI issue where Windows 7 would BSOD on the first boot after I installed it. But after a fix from a post on OCZ's forums it works great. It's also my first SSD and its completely night and day compared to my Velociraptor drive in my gaming rig.
However I may have just gotten lucky with a good drive, like curlysir stated I have also heard about people getting DOA's or having the drive just die on them. So crossing my fingers that it doesn't happen to me, because I also ordered mine from NE, although I got the regular version not the Max Ops version. Hope this helps.
 
curlysir said:
Have to disagree with you on this, at least in my case.

The Vertex 3 Max IOPS I purchased lasted 2 days before it became a brick. The drive was not ''RIGHT" from the beginning. I had a system that had been running a Vertex LE for over a year without a problem. I tried to replace the LE with the Vertex 3 and had nothing but trouble before it bricked on me. Drive would not boot at first at 6GB, and when I finally did get it to boot, I could not backup the drive or run an anti virus scan without a system freeze or BSOD. When it finally bricked on my I was attempting to run a full virus scan on the drive when I had a BSOD, after that the drive was not recognized in the BIOS and I could not access it. Tried it on 2 systems and had the same results.

Also, check the reviews on NE and check the OCZ forum. There has been mixed reviews on both sites. If you get a "GOOD" drive performance is great any everything works, but there are also quiet a few that are having the same and similar problems as I did. I think it will take a couple of firmware upgrades for these drives to be reliable. Unfortunately NE has a replacement only warranty on this drive or I would cut my losses and wait awhile.
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MaxIOPS - they use completely different NAND, firmware and potentially a different SF 2xxx ctrlr. That said,almost EVERY single issue with the Vertex 3's has been a configuration problem. The most common? The V3's require that the SATA ports be set in "hot-plug" mode.

The Vertex 3 MaxIOPS is a very different beast and shouldn't be clumped in with the vanilla V3's. Response has been overwhelmingly positive for the V3's so far.

I've had 8 of the V3's either in my own system or systems I built for others so far and all 8 have ran flawless so far. That said, I typically never see the issues many do. Knock on wood.

Seriously though, I cannot believe how many cases are user error. New post after new post after new post on OCZ forums of the same exact issue with x motherboard or the Marvell onboard ctrlr or this setting or that. "My image of W7" won't work on my new V3 etc. I'm glad I'm not a mod on that board because it would just be a bunch of stickies all over the place. I mean there were like 20 new posts from first post users in a two day period last week, posting "Vertex 3" problems - not a single one had anything to do with the drive itself. Ya gotta be careful when glancing at forums and NewEgg reviews - there's some real dummies that make some of the NewEgg reviews. I swear some of them are 12yrs old or have never had experience with building PCs.
 
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Instead of blaming the users, how about OCZ package instructions stating that OCZ SSD drives are not a mature technology and that the user is expected to tweak the BIOS and/or operating system to prevent BSODs?

Also, don't write too much data. This will severely degrade performance. How much data is too much? Oh, we ain't gonna tell you.

(A few months ago) Oh and your computer's fancy sleep function may not work. Just turn it off, k?

Still having a problem? Must be you or your system.
 
There is a little bit of that going on - although as far as writes go with the V3's, not V2's, I have hammered mine to death and they're still fast. I dumped 400GB (filled up the array) nonstop until full doing a data migration onto them and they're still screamin'.

I did kinda LOL when their main guy said that moving the pagefile off fixes a certain issue a user was having. You can't run the pagefile reliably on your SSD? Seriously? Yeah that's a little lame. Mine have all run fine. I'm on the best hardware you can get though for them - P67, I have not tried to run anything older with them. I guess if you want absolute reliability, buy an intel 320. Even the awesome C300 drives have their issues. Lots of people went a long time without a fix for C300 lockups/pauses and some folks still have the problem.
 
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Yea, its starting to look like I'll have to go for the Intel 320 series as they are really the only reliable current gen drives out there right now.
 
The Vertex 3's do seem a little more reliable.

It's not the SSD that's the problem, it's the shady company that might switch parts or components around on it without telling anyone.
 
Of course, you all have independent data that proves Vertex 2 are not reliable, and other SSDs are ?
 
Brahmzy said:
The Vertex 3 MaxIOPS is a very different beast and shouldn't be clumped in with the vanilla V3's. Response has been overwhelmingly positive for the V3's so far.
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Are there issues with the MaxIOPS drives then?
Was thinking of getting a pair to run in RAID0 and hadn't seen any issues with them yet across various forums.
 
I don't get the space thing...

Every HDD, SSD, flash memory, any storage medium I've ever used has never had rated storage capacity within windows after formatting....
 
DisrupTer911 said:
I don't get the space thing...

Every HDD, SSD, flash memory, any storage medium I've ever used has never had rated storage capacity within windows after formatting....
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No, you have apparently been confused by Windows' bug of displaying sizes in GiB but incorrectly labeling it GB.

GB = 1000^3 Bytes
GiB = 1024^3 Bytes

Almost all HDDs and SSDs have at least the number of GB available as advertised.

In contrast, some of OCZ's SSDs really did have less capacity than advertised.
 
My 64GB Crucial M225 SSD has the same capacity as a 60GB OCZ Vertex, so if anything it's OCZ that has been more honest about capacity in the past.
 
Aesma said:
My 64GB Crucial M225 SSD has the same capacity as a 60GB OCZ Vertex, so if anything it's OCZ that has been more honest about capacity in the past.
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Perhaps OCZ advertised lower than actual capacity in the distant past (Indilinx was two generations ago), but Crucial was apparently advertising very near (but slightly under) the actual capacity, and as far as I know, always has.

This review

http://www.hardwareheaven.com/reviews/821/pg3/ssd-roundup-august-2009-crucial-m225-128-gb.html

has a screenshot of the 128GB Crucial M225 used and free space, and the total is 128,033,222,656 bytes, which is, of course, 128.033GB, slightly more than advertised.

CruSpace.png
 
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Go to the OCZ support forum and you will see that there are some compatibility issues with the Vertex 3 series. Especially with certain Intel Chip sets (Intel 6 series) that are requiring some Bios and registry editing. These have to do with Hot Swap settings and LPM incompatibility.
 
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