Stay away from OCZ storage products

This is a neutral observation.

What this thread has firmly accomplished so far.

-- basically demolish the second-hand Solid State Disk market ---

For the old mechanical hard disk, even 3 or 4th hand, if it ever failed still under warranty, for example, you can submit a RMA online to request a replacement.

It appears SSD will not do this unless 1st party buyer from authorized reseller. I understand SSD's nature, hence no complain about it. Just an observation.
 
well hmchk that sounds reasonable enough, but what if it totaled in the thousands of devices? or even in the hundreds? as i stated, who is responsible for paying the people to test all of those drives in that situation? why should OCZ eat it? because i assure they will not. the people who purchase their products will.

It appears SSD will not do this unless 1st party buyer from authorized reseller. I understand SSD's nature, hence no complain about it. Just an observation.
Click to expand...


and lightp2 that is the most insightful post in this entire thread. +1
 
Ok so some faith restored in OCZ.

After posting on the forum and one of the mods working with me OCZ is finally willing to let me RMA the drives.

I am a bit disappointed that it took over 1 month from when I started PMing the mod until getting the final answer/go-ahead with the RMA. I would have been really pissed if it took an entire month just to get a 'no' again. Mainly because I was holding off on buying mechanical disks to replace the SSD's but was delaying it waiting for the final decision.

So some of my faith is restored in OCZ but I hope if anything others can learn from my mistake and if they ultimately decide to go with OCZ to at least be sure to buy from an authorized seller.

I will update this thread again when I actually get through the RMA process.
 
I can't believe this thread is so long!

During the OCZ Core Debacle I I went through about 6 OCZ disks.RMA after RMA. I was contacted via PM on a different board by an OCZ rep.He offered to refund me in cash for what I had spent providing I returned the disks. When the check came in the mail there was a note attached written in hand by the CEO of OCZ apologizing for the situation and asking me to not turn my back on OCZ in the future, I had gotten a 20$ rebate and told them about this when sending the disks back, My refund check didn't reflect this and I was refunded the full amount I originally paid. When reporting the issue to the OCZ rep I was told to let it slide. In the end it turned out that my DFI board was not compatible with SSD's. Fing DFI!!!!!!

This is what I call good business. OCZ is marketing their SSD's pretty heavily so they are going to get some complaints.
Unless Intel comes out with some products that continuously beat everyone else to the ground I will stick with OCZ for RAM, when the make what I need, and for SSD's.
 
I just want to add that when my 4 month old OCZ Agility started acting up I contacted Eric Ryder from the OCZ forums and I was immediately given an RMA with no hassles, and they sent my new Agility from Taiwan via Fedex.
 
They replaced a 120gb Vertex with a 120gb Vertex 2 cause the Vertex kept crapping out. Good RMA service!
 
I know there are disadvantages to having a legislation that is too much in favour of the consumers, but most of the time I'm very happy to live in a country where product flaws by law are covered by the shop where you bought it, usually for the first 5 years after you bought it. It's great not to have to read the fine print of every manufacturer's warranty and leave that job to the reseller.
 
Ok, I finally received two new OCZ Core v2 250 GB SSD's in the mail today. They came from taiwan and appear just as NIB as my original ones were. When I go to work later tonight I will test them in my server and see if I can get my 1TB SSD array back up and running and say good-bye to maxing out I/O on my server (20% iowait on a 8 cpu/thread system which is high). You can really see the difference it made when I got the SSD's back in January and then they died in July:

graph.php


My server maxes out on I/O so I am not even pushing as much traffic as I was before. The blip in Febraury is when I went from a quad core q6660 to a xeon e5530 (core i7 with HT) so iowait went down a bit from that.
 
Computurd said:
well, there goes another satisfied OCZ customer!
Click to expand...

Yeah, the guy only had to beg and plead (or argue) for days until OCZ agreed to replace their defective product.

Humiliate your customers and waste their time! Way to go, OCZ!
 
well its a point of view thing. from my perspective they granted an rma that they shouldn't have, thus doing him a favor. so some people eat some crow on their bashing, of course.
now, as to humiliate, i didnt see any of that.
humiliate- To lower the pride, dignity, or self-respect
Click to expand...

the only way he was humiliated was by his own admission of buying it on ebay. i didnt see ocz humiliate him. its not like they paraded him through town with a sign around his neck or anything ROFL
 
Computurd said:
from my perspective they granted an rma that they shouldn't have, thus doing him a favor.
Click to expand...

They manufactured a defective SSD, and then he had to argue with them for days to get them to replace it. If that is doing a favor, then I hope no one ever does such a favor for me.
 
nah, they replaced a ssd that he bought used off ebay, basically an online garage sale. again, different perspective. at least you backed away from the humiliate part LOL
 
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If they were going to replace it anyway, I wonder why it was necessary for him to ask OCZ repeatedly to fix their mistake. Basically, he had to jump through hoops for them, when the mistake was theirs -- they manufactured a product that failed prior to the period that they warranty the product for.

It is called customer service. For a company that cares about providing good service for their customers, the right way to handle it is to have the person seeking an RMA to provide the serial number, then the company looks up the serial number, and if it is a valid serial number and manufactured within the warranty period, then they should immediately start an RMA process. Of course they are entitled to examine the part when they receive it, and refuse to replace it if it had been abused, but they should have accepted the RMA without argument.

But OCZ obviously does not place a priority on good customer service. So you have to argue or beg to get them to do an RMA.
 
you know, once OCZ sent me this shirt. but the largest shirt they have was only XXL, so me being a big fucker, i cant really wear it, i gave it to my wife cause its too small.
maybe i should start a thread bitching about the free shirt being the wrong size?
2010-10-0121-56-08409.jpg

2010-10-0121-56-26057.jpg
 
Computurd said:
exactly what they did! how nice :)
Click to expand...

OCZ's idea of customer service is to humiliate their customers by making them beg to accept an RMA. That in itself is enough to make me avoid OCZ products. Add onto that reason, OCZ SSD reviewers on newegg tend to be less satisfied with their OCZ SSDs as compared to Intel and others, and the conclusion is to stay far away from OCZ SSDs.

Even if they do include a "free" T-shirt.
 
Computurd said:
you know, once OCZ sent me this shirt. but the largest shirt they have was only XXL, so me being a big fucker, i cant really wear it, i gave it to my wife cause its too small.
Click to expand...

I gotta say, your wife does not look very good in that T-shirt.:D
 
ROFL!!! lol.

they didnt 'include' the shirt, btw. they sent it to me. for free. no strings attached. even sent me some case badges too. thats good customer service :) i didnt even have to buy anything.
still dont get the humiliate part.
but seriously, john. where is aaronspink?
i miss him!
 
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john4200 said:
Yeah, the guy only had to beg and plead (or argue) for days until OCZ agreed to replace their defective product.

Humiliate your customers and waste their time! Way to go, OCZ!
Click to expand...

Actually it took *months* before I finally got an RMA and got the replacement drives.

Computurd said:
nah, they replaced a ssd that he bought used off ebay, basically an online garage sale. again, different perspective. at least you backed away from the humiliate part LOL
Click to expand...

What do you mean used? Just because it came off ebay it has to be used? I have sold NIB on ebay before and it was not used and actually happened to be OCZ memory several years ago...

They were no different in anyway on the packaging than the ones I got as replacement that were directly from OCZ and nothing on the ones I bought suggested they were used. The smart powercycle count also agreed they were new unless someone cleared the smart data.

If you think its so common that people sell used SSD's on ebay when doing perfect packaging/serial number matching and simply wipe out the smart data please show me a utility that will whipe out the smart data on my SSD's if they are so common.


Anyway to update the new SSDs are working without issue:

Code: 
  # Name             Raid Name       Level   Capacity Ch/Id/Lun  State
===============================================================================
  1 OS RAID6         8x1.5TB RAID SETRaid6     64.0GB 00/00/00   Normal
  2 DATABASE RAID10  8x1.5TB RAID SETRaid1+0   30.0GB 00/00/01   Normal
  3 DATA RAID6       8x1.5TB RAID SETRaid6   8891.0GB 00/00/02   Normal
  4 SSD RAID0        4x OCZ Core v2 SRaid0   1032.0GB 00/00/03   Normal
===============================================================================
GuiErrMsg<0x00>: Success.

Code: 
  # Ch# ModelName                       Capacity  Usage
===============================================================================
  1  1  ST31500341AS                    1500.3GB  8x1.5TB RAID SET
  2  2  ST31500341AS                    1500.3GB  8x1.5TB RAID SET
  3  3  ST31500341AS                    1500.3GB  8x1.5TB RAID SET
  4  4  ST31500341AS                    1500.3GB  8x1.5TB RAID SET
  5  5  ST31500341AS                    1500.3GB  8x1.5TB RAID SET
  6  6  ST31500341AS                    1500.3GB  8x1.5TB RAID SET
  7  7  ST31500341AS                    1500.3GB  8x1.5TB RAID SET
  8  8  ST31500341AS                    1500.3GB  8x1.5TB RAID SET
  9  9  OCZ Core_SSD V2                  258.5GB  4x OCZ Core v2 S
 10 10  OCZ SSD CORE V2                  258.5GB  4x OCZ Core v2 S
 11 11  OCZ  CORE_SSD V2                 258.5GB  4x OCZ Core v2 S
 12 12  OCZ SSD core v2                  258.5GB  4x OCZ Core v2 S
===============================================================================
GuiErrMsg<0x00>: Success.

Interesting to note that the replacement models have the same firmware as the two that didn't fail that were a part of my existing raid/volume set. Also I didn't even have to reboot to use the new array so my previous I/O read/write counts are from several months ago including re-populating the array:

Code: 
 04:07:09 up 220 days, 20:05, 13 users,  load average: 0.74, 1.01, 1.21

Code: 
Linux 2.6.32-houkouonchi-web100-ioat (houkouonchi)      10/02/2010

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
           4.12    0.27    6.02    6.22    0.00   83.36

Device:            tps    MB_read/s    MB_wrtn/s    MB_read    MB_wrtn
sdd              91.69        13.42         0.06  256051516    1057302
 
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@houk
firmware ver 1.1 will wipe it. most destructive firmware versions will wipe it (there are a few, but i dont know the numbers off my head) you dont need a utility.
your right, maybe they werent used. what i mean is, a manufacturer could have a reasonable expectation that they were used if bought off of ebay.
 
Computurd said:
@houk
firmware ver 1.1 will wipe it. most destructive firmware versions will wipe it (there are a few, but i dont know the numbers off my head) you dont need a utility.
your right, maybe they werent used. what i mean is, a manufacturer could have a reasonable expectation that they were used if bought off of ebay.
Click to expand...

What is this firmware ver 1.1 you speak of? To my knowledge OCZ never had a firmware for the Core series. Can you please link me to it?
 
oh jesus i forgot you bought the core series...lol. they suck! here is a firmware that is NOT officially supported, yet will suffice
just google "FWUPD_090508s.rar"
 
Computurd said:
oh jesus i forgot you bought the core series...lol. they suck! here is a firmware that is NOT officially supported, yet will suffice
just google "FWUPD_090508s.rar"
Click to expand...

They only suck at random-writes which my server never does. The array does 20,000 random 512-byte reads/sec with no issue. My server is 94% random reads, 5% sequential reads and 1% writes (with the writes not going to the SSD array). Thus other than the fact they failed the core series performs really well for my needs.

That firmware you listed is not a OCZ firmware? I think ti would be obvious if the drives were flashed with that. If it re-write smart info I would think it would also change the drives identity or firmware version and thus would be obvious that was done.
 
Now I'm worried. I just bought a NIB 240GB Vertex 2 off ebay. I hope I don't run into any ssd issues. If so, I'll have to go through the same ordeal. :(
 
I was actually thinking about getting an OCZ V2 SSD, this is making me think twice about purchasing one.
 
cixx79 said:
I was actually thinking about getting an OCZ V2 SSD, this is making me think twice about purchasing one.
Click to expand...

I"m not worried about their quality. I'm worried about their warranty. I've had no issues with my 50GB Vertex 2. I just hope that's the case with my 240GB when it arrives.
 
I'm still boycottign OCZ from their early 2000 fiasco where they had fake review sits and other shady things going on.

I know since then they have had new owners, but the OCZ name will never be in any of my computers.
 
OCZ has burned me more times than I can count. They are one of the worst companies I've ever had to deal with. I'll never buy or recommend another OCZ product. Ever.
 
houkouonchi said:
Ok so some faith restored in OCZ.

After posting on the forum and one of the mods working with me OCZ is finally willing to let me RMA the drives.

I am a bit disappointed that it took over 1 month from when I started PMing the mod until getting the final answer/go-ahead with the RMA. I would have been really pissed if it took an entire month just to get a 'no' again. Mainly because I was holding off on buying mechanical disks to replace the SSD's but was delaying it waiting for the final decision.

So some of my faith is restored in OCZ but I hope if anything others can learn from my mistake and if they ultimately decide to go with OCZ to at least be sure to buy from an authorized seller.

I will update this thread again when I actually get through the RMA process.
Click to expand...


Trust me , you don't know the hell of a truly horrible vendor .. case in point : http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1523533 as an update to that thread my brother kept my 4870x2 and I was able to fix it through the cooking method after which I resold it on this forum. So I created my own "happy" ending :)

I had to RMA a OCZ Vertex 60 gig and I got a response right away as well I didn't have to provide proof of purchase. I sent it in and got a replacement in a few weeks time.

I've recently bought OCZ Agility 2 drives and while after reading this thread I will be keeping my receipt without question I'm not any more or less nervous about this. Warranty transfers are a common issue for video cards and not every company does it so its not something brand new in the component business.
 
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