They lied to their customers by selling hardware under the same name as previously produced hardware with cheaper components and lesser specs.
They built hardware that was simply off-spec, an example being drives where the connectors were an entire millimeter shifted, such that when installed in certain machines the connectors literally could not make contact with the corresponding metal.
They built drives with extreme speeds while entirely sacrificing longevity and reliability.
At best they had a great marketing department that made it possible for them to peddle their crap to the public for so long.
I'm glad to see them go.
Edit:
For those who must have numbers, return statistics:
Probably the best thing you can say about OCZ is that they played a huge role in establishing the consumer SSD market.
Their original Vertex series had its rough edges but was a real breakthrough - they were the first to really push a "modern" SSD controller in the form of the Indilinx Barefoot. At the time, most other SSD drives on the market used horrible JMicron flash controllers that were more suitable for your camera's memory card; they were not really designed to cope with the traffic a desktop operating system would throw at them.
Back in the Vertex/Vertex2 days they really were the ones to beat for the most part. But then Intel came along with their incredibly stable SSDs and frankly, OCZ's drives started to seem like toys.
Part of OCZ's problem is that, starting with the Vertex 2 era, dozens of other companies used Sandforce controllers just like OCZ did. At that point OCZ obviously tried to compete on price and we can see what it did to their quality. To their credit, they made a really commendable last stab at relevance when they bought Indilinx so they could have their own custom controller and (maybe?) stop competing on price. Those drives got some great reviews although I don't know if they were reliable or what.
> They lied to their customers by selling hardware under the same name as previously produced hardware with cheaper components and lesser specs
I was hoping someone would bring this up. When shopping around for SSD drives a year or so ago, I stumbled upon stories about this and simply couldn't believe that a company would do something like that.
Basically, you'd read some reviews (with benchmarks) about OCZ drives. Then you would go and purchase the exact specific type that the reviewer had — and the hardware inside would be different (inferior). There was no way to check this without opening the drive up or measuring with benchmarks.
This was the moment I decided I would never buy anything from OCZ, as I can't do business with a company that lies to me. I am glad they are going away.
Sounds like what Packard Bell computers did. They were inexpensive. And if you bought two of the same model and opened them up you'd see different components. Different modems, ram, etc.
Their drives were better than Crucial. I had a Crucial SSD that due to a firmware bug became unusably slow (far slower than a mechanical drive) after a couple of months. They released a firmware update that supposedly fixed it (which also required tweaking BIOS settings and booting in to a weird minimal version of Windows 95 - in 2013...), but it only made it slightly better, still a totally useless drive. I'd take an OCZ drive any day - been using one in my main dev desktop for a while now and it's kept up just fine.
Surprised it's not Crucial going under after that experience.
I bought 2x4GB new Crucial memory sticks to upgrade a Mac this year, and they failed memtest. They are no longer a premium brand IMO. Replaced them with used Kingstons from eBay. No problems.
> They built drives with extreme speeds while entirely sacrificing longevity and reliability.
You don't say. One example being the OCZ RevoDrives.
Our company investigated replacing our traditional HDDs with SSDs and with RevoDrives to see how that impacted our build-times and development efficiency.
Almost every second user who received a RevoDrive experienced critical data-failures and 100% data-loss.
What they didn't say on the package WITH CAPITAL LETTERS was that it was a RAID0/JBOD of SSDs with zero redundancy. If one drive failed (and they did) you lost all your data with no means of recovery.
We could have asked for replacement units because they were still under warranty (some as new as 2 months), but needless to say, we weren't very eager on more drives from OCZ.
If the rest of their product line-up was like this, I can't say I'm too surprised about them not making it for the long run.
> What they didn't say on the package WITH CAPITAL LETTERS was that it was a RAID0/JBOD of SSDs with zero redundancy
This really shouldn't matter to the consumer - there are lots of ways to couple components in a black box to increase the rate of failure. They don't disclose to you how the controller is built, or how they go about marking bad blocks, so why would they say in bold letters that under the covers they're striping across two disks?
I'm not sure it's so bad. I bought my OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 2.5 years ago, it's been great and I'm still happy with it. They also have had many good reviews.
Both of my OCZ Vertex 2 died on me. I was able to bring one back from the dead with firmware upgrade and repartitioning and reformatting. Second one serves as interesting although bit thick coaster. Couldn't return them to manufacturer because they were not bought from one of their listed retailers. I couldn't return them to the shop either because they worked few years before any trouble happened.
I was lucky I got RMA and got a replacement. I sold the replacement on ebay once I got it and ever since I couldn't trust another SSD myself. Though I am still very happy with the SSD that comes with my Macbook Pro 15"
Everyone on HN is glad you're happy, but your single data point does fly in the face of statistically significant reliability problems with OCZ drives (ie, the only real way to evaluate storage manufacturers).
In an era of high-quality search, you could plug this into the search engine of your choice and get a better answer than you're likely to find on the HN comments.
Do you have actual statistics? I'd truly like to see them.
Most of the reliability problems I've seen have been self-reported, so I'm not sure what biases are present in what I've seen. ;)
(I agree that many of their practices were bad, which likely lent to bad drives! This isn't trolling, just genuine curiosity if there were published stats)
Crucial has taken top spot from Intel thanks to a notable increase in Intel’s returns rate. We should say that this time, the Intel sample is only just above the minimum required and that some of the Intel returns are linked to the 8MB bug which has since been resolved. The OCZ rate has got a lot worse, going up to 7%, and only OCZ has models with rates of above 5%:
- 15.58% OCZ Vertex 2 Series SSD 240 GB
- 13.28% OCZ Vertex 2 Series SSD 160 GB
- 11.76% OCZ Vertex 2 Series SSD 80 GB
- 9.52% OCZ Vertex 2 Series SSD 120 GB
- 8.57% OCZ Vertex 3 Series 120 GB
- 7.49% OCZ Vertex 2 Series SSD 60 GB
- 6.61% OCZ Vertex 2 Series 3.5" SSD 120 GB
- 6.37% OCZ Vertex 3 Series 240 GB
- 6.37% OCZ Agility 3 60 GB
- 5.89% OCZ Vertex 2 Series SSD 100 GB
The Vertex 2s have the worst scores but the Vertex 3s have nothing to be proud of either. Note that over the coming period, the Vertex 3s are doing much better thanks to developments in the firmware, with a rate of just 1.01% for the Vertex 3 120 GB as things stand.
Wow thanks for the data! In 10 years of interest in acquiring data in hardware return stats, this is the first time I come across such a source.
"The first question is of course where the stats come from. They’re taken from a large French etailer, whose database we have had direct access to. We were therefore able to extract the stats we wanted directly from source."
Oh good! I'd posted specifically to ensure just you were happy, but it warms my heart to know that the entirety of HN is officially glad that I'm happy too!
I'll provide a dissenting data point. After going through 5 RMA's with Vertex 2 drives, I finally convinced them to just upgrade me to a Vertex 3, due to reports of better reliability. The Vertex 3 failed within a week. Considered the drive a lost cause, swapped in a Crucial M4 -- been rock solid ever since.
I had a similar experience with the Vertex 2, and switched to Intel 320 and subsequently Samsung 840 Pro. Intel and Samsung drives have done a great job, while I had 3 Vertex 2 failures.
please, unless you compared their offering with other ssds or used their support forums, this comment is as empty as it can be.
ssds are better than spinning media, so what? even the worst one would make you happy. this is not the point. they constantly send one device to reviewers and then put lesser specs on the shelfs, or less immorally, just updated the revision silently to cut costs. i have a couple of them. i regret buying because what i got was something equivalent to something i could have gotten cheaper. also, admins often mocked people on the support forums.
Those numbers are actually incredibly skewed and not very accurate - I can confidently say that a large amount of the returns in the Vertex 2/3 and Agility 2/3 lines were due to firmware problems which were fixed very early on. Customers simply didn't understand that upgrading firmware was not optional, and the support team was not large/capable enough to teach this to every customer. Many of the drives which were returned were simply re-flashed to the new firmware and sent back, working perfectly.
I have 4 OCZ SSDs of various models. When I bought them I'd read the forums and there was almost always a notice about upgrading the firmware to fix issues. I always kept up on firmware updates and I've never had a problem with a drive.
However, the problem is that the retail firmware on the drive shouldn't have had the kinds of problems that would require a firmware fix.
"They built drives with extreme speeds while entirely sacrificing longevity and reliability." This is so true, I had their SSD before, and it broken ==> I lost most of my data in that drive...
They were never great.
They lied to their customers by selling hardware under the same name as previously produced hardware with cheaper components and lesser specs.
They built hardware that was simply off-spec, an example being drives where the connectors were an entire millimeter shifted, such that when installed in certain machines the connectors literally could not make contact with the corresponding metal.
They built drives with extreme speeds while entirely sacrificing longevity and reliability.
At best they had a great marketing department that made it possible for them to peddle their crap to the public for so long.
I'm glad to see them go.
Edit:
For those who must have numbers, return statistics:
http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=2&h...
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/911-7/ssd.html