Vertex 3 are a plague?

http://www.amazon.com/Vertex-240GB-...1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1335404451&sr=1-1

Well, i once got me a 120 and a 240 GB MI, and i never ever had in mind that all the stuff ever happens just did happen. I had in mind IT buisness is something reliable and such... and they would test teyr products, compatibility and what else. Both drive finally died on me and causing random freeze... i seriously had 900$ wasted.

Finally, the 990X CPU was the much better deal... it was a really cheap CPU because it works! The condition of "working" is magical!

My general trust into SSD ultimately is gone- After those incidents, i do investigate new SSDs such as a doctor and are trying to get unbiased views (which are rare). And what SF has been creating is headache to me, im sorry. I surely give nothing at speed when something isnt stable, it doesnt matter at all. Its useless, i mean 100% useless (there is no excuse and there never will be a excuse for having lack of stability), plain and simple.

I dont think there is any website or review site being fully neutral, they all are in some way shackled by the big companys. For me the entire matter is over, i got my lesson. Probably the worst moment of my entire IT experience, so it will only go up... thats certain.

Then SF is commenting over and over that the stuff been fixed, same for OCZ but is there any true details about its failure? Any bulletproof evidence that it is now completly fixed, instead of permannently pointing at like 10 different firmware updates? Guess have to accept that the design is a failure and should accept full money back for any unhappy customer. Sorry to Toshiba, your NANDs are great deal... cant help it, simply attached to the wrong controller.

Im over with. M4 is my new SSD ruler. Intel is good too but just to expensive. M4 can do same for lesser. I dont know why i ever trusted OCZ, prehaps because every single website on the Net was telling me how awesome and bloody fast those Vertex are running and not a single word about instability issues with 50% of the worlds systems. I mean FIVTY PERCENT..., thats a proven value, people. Thats a product unable to be sold under any "common sense" condition, luckily many people may lack common sense.

Dont care if stuff gets deleted, the entire matter is just unbelievable. In term we are labor rats, at least the stuff should be cheap and we will be able to get money back... for up to three years... thats the stuff i do demand in order not to get a critical hit in reputation.

Where do you have the 50%.number from?

Also why not rma the ssds if they are broken then sell them and buy a different brand?

You want bulletproof evidence that sandforce controllers have the kinks worked out, closest you will come to that is the fact that intel uses them now. And that 50% number is either misleading or downright dishonest. You would have to be counting all the netbooks and non sata laptops and the like to get anything close to 50% of computers being not compatible with a vertex

And if you couldnt find reviews showing problems with ocz and ezrly sandforce 2200 based ssds, you werent looking. Ive read dozens of them, from when they had fail firmware.

50% numbers are bad ONE STAR rating from Amazon customers. I never saw any product with so much one star on Amazon ever (they would have gotten ride of it).

I demand money back.. ofc i do not get. Im feed up with all those freezes, no one know what kind of pain i had from that stuff, cant even play properly anymore because freezes all the time. I had to kick out both drives.. i try to get replacement but honestly i dont want one, i just want my cash back. They should extract the valuable Toshiba nand however... such waste to put them into faulty designs.

When I first got my 120GB V3 MI it had the known stuttering issue. Going to OCZ's site and updating the firmware solved all problems. I really wouldn't put too much faith into Amazon reviews. If you really don't wan't to RMA them and you can't return them then I'll gladly take them off your hands, just shoot me a PM.

Ivy said:

50% numbers are bad ONE STAR rating from Amazon customers.

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If you are basing your 50% failure rate off of Amazon 1 star ratings, that is an extremely poor metric. You have no idea how many have sold overall and how many actually failed. I would argue that people that had one fail on them are more likely to give a bad rating, while people that had one work forgot about it or didn't care. You have a very small and biased subset of results, so basing any opinions off of those numbers are going to be extremely biased and (probably) incorrect.

Well i do, because i had to remove both drives. Not going to happen, im tired of them selling unreliable producs for a insane amount of cash.

Thats not entirely true, check out how much good reviews we have for games at a site such as that:
http://www.wog.ch/index.cfm/details/product/24047-Elder-Scrolls-5-Skyrim-inkl-Landkarte#ratings

The overpriced 990X... FULL 5 star rating!!!
http://www.amazon.com/Intel-i7-990X...1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1335409016&sr=1-1
No one says a bad thing about it, because it works... thats all it have to do!

So you honestly think people would NOT give feedback when they happy with?! For a product as expensive such as that one? 4-6 times more than a game? I dont believe into fairy tales, i want a scientific proof of it. I want results on a trusted (...thats really hard) paper, else i rather trust user reviews, they still are the most unbiased ones. When someone very happy with theyr product, they in many cases give good review, that has been proven by so many other sources.

There is another factor which works against companys: Many of them are doing fake reviews... it already happened at geizhals.de from OCZ....
And they are deleting theyr forum entrys from many customers.

And most users such as me are even to stupid to put endless firmware on theyr drives because they dont have to. They was buying a bulletproof product for a good (?) price and can expect it to work with a probability of 98% and no less, else its not ready to be sold on the market**. Then, when we have a firmware update (we are officially not allowed to do so and have full responsibility, OCZ is helping us to get ride of warranty, as far as my knowledge goes) failure, are they giving us a new drive? Past experience from other users at many other manufacturers has been telling... nope! Maybe its different for OCZ, i didnt try out yet. **A firmware is not a driver, its a sensitive action and not meant to be "abused" or even "used". Not updating it, is more common sense than updating it.

Putting firmware updates is better than throwing it away, however. There is a small chance that it could work (and a small chance that the drive can break completly). However, i dont feel like a labor rat, i had enough of freezes already and just want the nightmare to end. Got better stuff to do than playing labor rat and i dont even get paid for it..

Again, when firmware fails, do they cover it by warranty, that is my question. I hope its not to hard to answer. I want a clear (a very strong!) YES, any other answer is inacceptable.

thideras said:

If you are basing your 50% failure rate off of Amazon 1 star ratings, that is an extremely poor metric. You have no idea how many have sold overall and how many actually failed. I would argue that people that had one fail on them are more likely to give a bad rating, while people that had one work forgot about it or didn't care. You have a very small and biased subset of results, so basing any opinions off of those numbers are going to be extremely biased and (probably) incorrect.

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QFT. People would much rather take the time to ***** about a product than they would to sing its praises. Add in the fact that the majority of people are probably too stupid to install/configured a SSD drive correctly, and I'd guess the "failure" rate is much less than you think.

Ivy said:

So you honestly think people would NOT give feedback when they happy with?! For a product as expensive such as that one? 4-6 times more than a game? I dont believe into fairy tales, i want a scientific proof of it. I want results on a trusted (...thats really hard) paper, else i rather trust user reviews, they still are the most unbiased ones. When someone very happy with theyr product, they in many cases give good review, that has been proven by so many other sources.

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Yes, I do, mainly because I'm one of those people that completely forget about it once I get the item. Are you suggesting that Amazon has sold around 38 of those drives? Because that sounds a low to me.

Ivy said:

There is another factor which works against companys: Many of them are doing fake reviews... it already happened at geizhals.de from OCZ....
And they are deleting theyr forum entrys from many customers.

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Wait, so are you agreeing with me or not?

If the quantity and quality of the reviews can't be trusted, how can you trust numbers derived from them?

This thread made me lul...

OCZ seems to have a higher failure rate than other brands, even despite using similar controllers/NAND as other brands, but it is more like 5-10%, not 50%.

Flashing an ssd firmware takes about 60 to 90 seconds, using automated tools available from the drive maker. Its very similar to flashing a motherboard or video card bios, in my experience. And about as automated as installing drivers.

If you havent at least checked your firmware revision to see if it was one of the ones with known issues I would encourage you to do so. Even if you dont want to keep the drives at that point, you would be able to sell them used. I have 2 sandforce 2200 based ssds in use currently, and both have been flawless, one for 6 months, another for 3.

I dont sell stuff i dont trust on it, i can get bad feedback... i do no betray customers.

120 is 2.02 and 240 is 2.08, but i wouldnt put to much trust on it, in term design is failure, some hardware works and some never will.

Fact is that the driver is very sensitive to system specs and might even have some dodgy controllers (worse than others of same type). Thus resulting in just as many unhappy such as happy customers... face reality because most dont do it. A bulletproof hardware does work with almost any system not older than 5 years. Every single HDD does pass that condition. Dont get it why people even protect unstable hardware, just because its fast. Honestly, i rather drive 10 times slower than having a freeze.

Well, if you dont want to make an effort to make the drives work, or rma them for being broken, which I doubt they both are, then I guess this thread is at an end. But your bad experience doesnt make the entire vertex line a plague.

Ivy said:

I dont sell stuff i dont trust on it, i can get bad feedback... i do no betray customers.

120 is 2.02 and 240 is 2.08, but i wouldnt put to much trust on it, in term design is failure, some hardware works and some never will.

Fact is that the driver is very sensitive to system specs and might even have some dodgy controllers (worse than others of same type). Thus resulting in just as many unhappy such as happy customers... face reality because most dont do it. A bulletproof hardware does work with almost any system not older than 5 years. Every single HDD does pass that condition. Dont get it why people even protect unstable hardware, just because its fast. Honestly, i rather drive 10 times slower than having a freeze.

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Do you remember the Seagate 7200.11 (10?) drives? Those things were failing left and right. We got a few file servers at my office a couple years ago that we have had to replace over a dozen drives because of the poor firmware issues with those models.

As others have said, if you don't want to take the time to get the drives working (via firmware or other troubleshooting) or RMA them and then sell the product as 'fresh from RMA' then that is your problem.

Also, I am pretty damn sure that people are more willing to leave a negative review about a product than a positive one. If I buy a product and I am happy with it, why would I post a positive review for something that works as expected?. If I get something that is throwing me fits about working/etc then I am more likely to post a review to tell others that there are potential problems/issues with the product.

Janus67 said:

Do you remember the Seagate 7200.11 (10?) drives? Those things were failing left and right. We got a few file servers at my office a couple years ago that we have had to replace over a dozen drives because of the poor firmware issues with those models.

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I, in fact, just replaced a 7200.11 with an Agility 3, Works fine.

I got my vertex3 max iops for 320 dollars right after it came out and banged my head against the wall for months and months trying to get it to work properly. firmware revision after firmware revision, all with release notes saying the issues were fixed, and nothing ever changed. reinstalled windows a million times with different drivers, different sata configs, everything. ended up plugging it into the Marvell sata controller because it would only crash once a day or so instead of every few hours like on the intel controller.

Finally RMA'd it and the customer service was total crap. probably 3 different people asked me the same exact list of questions, which they could have found the answers to in the "describe your problem" box of my RMA. Have you tried a secure erase? Have you tried reinstalling windows? Have you tried unplugging the drive and plugging it back in? Have you tried lighting 320 dollars on fire?

When they finally processed my RMA I sold it on here for like 200 bucks. Big loss and big headache for nothing. Because some QA didnt test the drives on intel platforms properly.

Now I think the new firmware has actually fixed the problems the drives have. I haven't seen many people complaining like they used to. OCZ support forum was a trainwreck of vertex3 posts.

I'm using a sandforce controller in both my mushkin drives now and they are fine. Sucks that you had those problems. I feel you

Ok, news flash, sandforce 2 had/has issues. Intel spent a lot of money fixing them, so if you want perfect, server class plug and play + performance, buck up. Otherwise, get yourself a cheap/slow performing samsung drive or sandforce gen 1. Oh wait no, you want bleeding edge performance for bottom dollar and you cna't get it so you come here and complain. OCZ and sandforce tried to do their best but they're both fledgling companies that need to learn about customer service and validation. That was obvious ever since the release if you did your research which you probably didn't because this type of drive behavior is anything but new.

I myself did my research and weighed the pro's and con;s and price of the sandforce 2. I got an agility 3 drive for 275 (when they were 325 and vertex was 350+). Drive didn;t work with my envy 14 laptop, would BSOD after 3-4 hours. Ok I lost 6 bucks RMAing that drive and then I bought an M4 for 325. Less performance, more ex[ensive, more reliable. Lesson learned... yeah don't use sandforce 2 and envy 14. I still havn;t lost faith in sandforce 2, I just bought a callisto deluxe for my G53SW laptop. At 240 bucks for 240GB vs 300 for 256GB M4 I'm willing to put a few hours of my time and 6 bucks of shipping on the line to test it. If it doesn;t work, I RMA and buy an M4.

Lesson learned,
If you want absolute best performance and price is not an issue but time/reliability is extremely important, get the Intel 520.
If you want absolute best performance and price is an issue and you have time, go sandforce 2...OCZ/Mushkin/Corsair etc
If you need reliability/out of box experience and decent performance get M4
If you just need a reliable SSD there's tons of older gen SATA 2 drives that are very cheap.

Do your research, weigh your time, performance needs and budget. Sorry if life and computer parts aren;t simple.

Janus67 said:

Do you remember the Seagate 7200.11 (10?) drives? Those things were failing left and right. We got a few file servers at my office a couple years ago that we have had to replace over a dozen drives because of the poor firmware issues with those models.

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Speaking of that, I'm dealing with a failing 7200.11 in my server as we speak. Its reallocating sectors at a good clip and spewing errors in its self-tests. Time to get a replacement and resilver the array before anything happens (the other two drives are going strong for the moment, but they're also 7200.11s).

JigPu

All these problems is why I decided to go with the Samsung 830. OCZ just doesn't seem to focus on quality and if I'm dropping a lot of money on a SSD I expect the details to be done right. I've bought my SSD's. Once I have my PC built I'll have to post on how they run.