I wasn't aware of it before reading into this whole story, but OCZ seemed to have quite a problem with QA. My vertex 2 barely lasted a year before it started going funny, which I put down to bad luck. But now it seems I wasn't the only one.
They are notorious for pushing out low quality products. You really should be a more informed consumer before you buy stuff, it's not like it takes a long time to research this kind of stuff.
At the consumer level, it is quite difficult to research a lot of this kind of thing. There is so much contradictory information out there on almost every product, and trying to ferret out the right information can be a gruelling task.
Go to a few review sites, have the reviews say "OCZ looks fast and good", go away with a good impression. You have to look elsewhere - on forums and the like, all of which are highly variant in quality - to get information about long-term performance. It's compounded when you have a new player or new product lines. Here in this very thread, it has several people saying "OCZ is great".
Well, Newegg at least makes it possible to distinguish an OCZ from an Intel/Samsung. When an OCZ drive has 3-stars and 30% of them are 1-star reviews, then you know something is wrong, compared to the Intel drive that has 4.5-stars with only 5% being 1-star.
It's in the finer gradations that it gets murky. Is a 4.5-star drive really better than a 4-star drive?
