1

OCZ Technologies – SSD Hardware Failures

Over the last couple of years OCZ Technologies have gone down the pan where quality control comes in, I have used OCZ products on and off over the years (RAM, CPU Coolers etc) but to date the worst experience I have had with OCZ Technologies has been with their SSD units.

In the last year I had to RMA my Vertex 1 SSD due to a drive failure after 18 months or so of moderate use (in my spare time when I don’t blog and play with technology I play World of Warcraft), all in all not too long and certainly not anywhere near the 1.5 million hours that OCZ claim the drive is expected to last. I should add that the I used a normal spinning drive for any downloads and the OS page file.

Now the RMA process itself was relatively painless (not as good as WD who advance RMA the drive to you before you have to send the drive back to them) and a lot better than customers in the US have experienced (OCZ have taken a battering over their poor CS in their US forums) and since getting the new OCZ Vertex back I haven’t experienced any further issues with it.

I recently decided to have a look at the new Ubuntu 12.04 beta that was doing the rounds and rather than overwriting my existing SSD drive I decided to purchase a new SATA 3 drive, it didn’t have to be anything too special or large and that’s where the OCZ Petrol 64gb drive came in.

The drive was purchased on the 1st of April 2012, placed in my desktop (replacing the Vertex 1) and had Ubuntu 12.04 installed on it for testing purposes, all in all it was a relatively painless experience with the only issues being my lack of understanding where Linux\Ubuntu is concerned. Rather than using it on a day to day basis my goal at the time was to see if I could get WoW running on it satisfactorily (at the time of writing the answer is no BUT that could have been down to the SSD).

Move forward to today, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is released to the general public and I downloaded the ISO and built a USB key to allow me to do a fresh install, the past couple of times I installed 12.04 (laptop and desktop) it’s not taken any more than 10 minutes however today was taking in excess of 40 minutes and even crashed out twice so I decided to try and install via CD just in case it was an issue with the USB key but the same thing happened again, eventually I managed to get the OS installed (by about 8pm tonight) but on boot up was being prompted about missing applications \ languages packs and then the OS hung on me, a quick reboot later and a check of the drive properties in Ubuntu and I was horrified to discover that the drive had bad blocks reported on it. This is a new drive that’s not even a month old, been powered on less than 20 times and had a run time of no more than 10 – 20 hours Sad smile.

Needless to say an RMA process has been started and this blog post created to try and warn people away from OCZ Technologies SSD’s because until they can prove beyond doubt that their manufacturing process works better than it does at the moment I really can’t advise people to use their products any more.

Simon

One Comment

  1. That’s kind of scary, to install something serious on this kind of drive. I would have thought that the OCZ drives are more reliable than that. It’s maybe different kind of game with the new Vertex 4 which is Guarrantee 5 years. Or not. Definitely good that you shared that experience.

    Best regard,
    Vladan

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *