OCZ Vertex 3's have been pounded for reliability problems[4], so much so that they've just started a special deal on Newegg [2]. And coincidentally, I'm sure, a jolly story about "a machine's view of time" replete with olde-worlde charm, shows up on the front page of a major tech site, and oh, by the way, let me end by saying "I use OCZ Vertex 3's"...
Tom's Hardware suggests that Crucial's m4 series are faster than OCZ Vertex 3's, and don't come with a horrendous approval rating. A 256Gb m4 is $319 on newegg [1].
Intel's new 520 SSDs appear to have given them a proper SSD instead of the floppy-disc-like performance of the 510.[3] Though its $499 for 240gb. [5]
All drives have failures, and while it sucks to be the one that gets the dodgy drive, there will always be someone who can post "it didn't work for me". However, the OCZ Vertex have an unusually high number of "It didn't work for me" reviews. Is it a stitch-up? It'd be easy for "a motivated third party" to buy 27 drives off newegg and post negative reviews. It'd also be in OCZ's interest to fan the flames of doubt on the SF2281 as they are releasing new SSDs based on their own, newly-purchased, Indilinx controllers. But taking off the tin-foil hat, it does look like Vertex 3's have problems.
I have exactly 0 hardware manufacture connections. I give you my word that this was just a fun post that I've been thinking about off and on for a long time. No one influenced me to write the post at all, in any way.
Why did I recommend the OCZ? AnandTech writes about OCZ products a lot, and I trust them. I wrote the post a few days ago thinking that mostly my friends would read it. It only occurred to me today to post it on hacker news, when I saw that I got like 7 +1s from friends.
"Back in October SandForce announced that it had discovered a firmware issue that resulted in unexpected BSODs on SF-2281 drives on certain platforms. Why it took SandForce several months to discover the bug that its customers had been reporting for a while is a separate issue entirely. SandForce quickly pushed out the firmware to OCZ and other partners. Our own internal testing revealed that the updated firmware seemed to have cured the infamous BSOD."
Yay!
"As luck would have it, our own Brian Klug happened to come across an unexpected crash with his 240GB non-Intel SF-2281 based SSD two weeks ago when he migrated it to another machine. The crash was an F4 BSOD, similar in nature to the infamous BSOD issue from last year."
Oh. This was written 2/6/12.
...
"Whatever Intel has done with the 520's firmware seems to have fixed problems that still remain in the general SF-2281 firmware."
...
"While it's nearly impossible to prove most of this, the fact that we're still able to reproduce a BSOD on the latest publicly available SF-2281 firmware but not on the SF-2281 based Intel SSD 520 does say a lot about what you're paying for with this drive."
Point taken; recommendation withdrawn. For the record I ordered my drive on the 4th, before that article was posted and after, I'd believed, those issues were resolved.
I don't expect that I'll receive an apology for being called an unethical shill.
I'd still love to see some statistics on failure rates. All this anecdata is obnoxious for a buyer to wade through.
That's too bad... I have the same SSD from last June and it's been running in my Windows machine without a problem. I don't think I'll be getting a computer without an SSD in the future.
I guess hardware roulette with storage still has the worst odds...
I've owned 5 SSD's over the past 3 years. 2 OCZ, 2 crucial, 1 intel. Both OCZs failed, one after a month the other after 9 months. The oldest, a 3 year old crucial is still working fine.
Tom's Hardware suggests that Crucial's m4 series are faster than OCZ Vertex 3's, and don't come with a horrendous approval rating. A 256Gb m4 is $319 on newegg [1].
Intel's new 520 SSDs appear to have given them a proper SSD instead of the floppy-disc-like performance of the 510.[3] Though its $499 for 240gb. [5]
All drives have failures, and while it sucks to be the one that gets the dodgy drive, there will always be someone who can post "it didn't work for me". However, the OCZ Vertex have an unusually high number of "It didn't work for me" reviews. Is it a stitch-up? It'd be easy for "a motivated third party" to buy 27 drives off newegg and post negative reviews. It'd also be in OCZ's interest to fan the flames of doubt on the SF2281 as they are releasing new SSDs based on their own, newly-purchased, Indilinx controllers. But taking off the tin-foil hat, it does look like Vertex 3's have problems.
[1] http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148...
[2] http://promotions.newegg.com/OCZ/022912/index.html?cm_sp=Cat...
[3] http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/ssd-520-sandforce-review-bench...
[4] http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=20-227-707&#...
[5] http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167...