OCZ Vertex 4 256GB SSD review Time was, when OCZ was typically first out of the gate with a range of SSDs based on any new incarnation of SandForce controllers. Yet, the first generation of the company’s popular Vertex drives were powered by Indilinx’s Barefoot controller. Now, with the fourth generation of Vertex drives, OCZ has completed the circle and …
eBuyer seem to be having a big of a sale on OCZ SSD drives at the moment..
http://www.ebuyer.com/ocz-vertex-4
The 256GB drive is tuppence shy of £ 170.00 - so a few quid more than the Samsung, but maybe worth it for some (e.g. I'll be testing one as soon as I can IF the encryption is enabled in the consumer version - that's the only thing stopping me looking at the Samsung straight away, they only enable it in the OEM versions)
Sounds impressive, but it's not like a five year warranty on, say, a washing machine, because the price of these things is plummeting over time so even in two year's time there won't be nearly as much incentive to go to the trouble of claiming a replacement under warranty than there is now. If they reckon by slapping a 5 year warranty on it they will make a net profit despite the anticipated number of claims then that is what they will do.
If only 1 in 10 of your drives fail in a 5 year period then you've blown your profit margin by the time you figure out the cost of replacement devices (even if they are cheaper), staff to process the RMA, postage etc. You've also blown your reputation and are going to struggle to stay in the market.
No, that isn't the full story. I agree that you incur extra costs to provide replacements, but you only have to spend money if your customers with failed drives can be bothered to go through the complicated series of hoops you have put in place to allow them to claim a replacement, when they can buy new again more quickly and for much less than they paid in the first place (which is inevitable barring a Thai flood-style disaster). Or more likely they will take the opportunity to buy a much better product new. That neatly deals with a chunk of the failed drives you have sold to punters who think they offer greater reliability because the guarantee is longer.
I also don't see how your reputation is damaged by increasing the guarantee length without increasing the reliability of the product. Taking your failure figure of one in ten over five years, that will happen whether they have a five year guarantee or not, so the annoyance factor will be the same. And the people who really do want it replaced under guarantee can do so, enhancing your reputation compared with the original guarantee period.
Warranty? Really?
I go by the reviews. If something doesn't get a lot of eggs and I'm not already familiar with it, then I don't buy it.
OCZ has crap reviews for quality. I don't want to have to use the warranty. If I'm using the warranty (extended or otherwise) then the entire purchase has already been a failure.
"looking at the picture angling the chip might make the paths to/from the pins shorter, easier to spread out to the relevant peripheral chips and with less right-angles involved?"
All possible - it may also make it easier to get length matching on the traces to the memory chips without burning a lot of PCB, it's not uncommon and can greatly reduce the total trace length for all the above reasons.
Have you tried getting a samsung 830 recently? I had to wait 5 weeks for my 256gb ones.
The chip is angled to get equal trace lengths, This has been discussed in other reviews.
WRT HDD failure rates, all makers go through bad patches and in the last 30 years I've cursed all of them equally. Transit handling (ie, what happens AFTER the drive leaves the factory) is more important than anything else.
With a 1-2 year warranty, HDD makers traditionally went bankrupt on a 0.1-0.2% failure rate. 5 years indicates strong confidence in the product.
Ive got a bunch of OCZ SSD products so can speak from first hand experience.
The Vertext 3 is fine once I upgraded the firmware and its been my boot drive for 6+ months without a hitch.
Ive also got a Vertex 4 and although i've not used it as a boot drive looks pretty damn fine. The winning aspect of the Vertex 4 is the speeds are uncompressed. So the performance you get from Crystal disk is actually the performance you get. Have one in a production machine at a customer site.
I've also got at OCZ cheap drive. Its a complete piece of s***e. It formats, you can put an OS on it, but 1-2 week in it craps out. I've tried to use it as a disk for booting VMs. It cant do that reliably. Its actually useless.
So I can vouch for the Vertex 3 and Vertex 4. I think they are great products. I would on experience by hesitant using their cheaper SSDs but I could have been unlucky. Have an older Intel SSD too which is fine but nowhere near as quick as the Vertex.
It sounds like you have a sample of (1) SSD per model vs. the thousands of people who have had compatibility and reliability issues with virtually all OCZ products. When it comes to SSD issues OCZ is not alone as this immature tech has cost many a consumer data, loss of SSD capacity, BSOD, frequent RMA's, etc. OCZ's SSDs and other products seem to be at the top of the heap of half-baked hardware rushed to market but Corsair is not far behind with their SSDs, H2O coolers, etc.
It has become very profitable to ship half-baked crap to enthusiasts be it mobos, O/S's, SSDs, RAM, CPU H2O coolers, etc. As long as people buy this half-baked crap, there is no incentive for suppliers to ship quality products. There truly is a sucker born every second - maybe even more than one? /s
Well first hand experience of 2x Vertex 3 and 2 x Vertex 4 which have been ok. And one shitty Vertex Plus (i think thats the model). Attached to a variety of machines.
Yes very small sample still but I thought I would state my experience with them in light of a sweeping statement that stated that they all got reliability issues.
No doubt you used several too and got first hand experience of their unreliability. Or maybe your mate has one, or you friends friend. Or possibly you read it somewhere on a forum.
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