My OCZ Vertex 2 Saga

[midnightray]

Hello all, long time

Well, I thought I would share a cautionary tale about OCZ and their Vertex 2 drives. I'm on my second one and it has problems.

So, 1st drive. I put it into my Novatech laptop and it works for about 6 days before it locks itself and didn't accept writes. RMA back to Aria. Shame it was from Aria as I paid the postage and had the hassle.

Ok so I went back to the hard drive it cam with whilst looking at getting a new laptop for software development. You probably don't know but I work for a start up software company managing the software product, its designed to be highly scalable, multi core and eat all your RAM

I settled on the Samsung RF710 laptop due to the i7 chip and 6gb of RAM. Enough for decent development. I then decided to get another SSD and went for the Vertex 2 120gb from Novatech this time (local, so easy to pickup rather than get the posty sitting on it!)

This drive now has its own problems. It locks up for 30-50 seconds where any hard drive activity is queued.

I have had an email chain with Eric at OCZ and then on the forum.

I'll copy + paste most of it to here, incase they delete or modify it.

-------------------------------

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/fo...second-freezes

The drive performs nicely except for random 30-50 second freezes where the computer is semi responsive but the hard drive light is solid.

I've upgraded to 1.24 firmware.

The version of Intel RST is 9.6.3.1001 which is the version that came with the laptop. I'v tried the official Intel version and version 10, neither did anything.

I've disabled the page file, defrag, in power setting made it never turn off hard drives and turned off write caching. Nothing seems to have solved it. Also tried in various combinations of on and off.

It has been left idle at login for about 8 hours this week already.

In power options, disk power off is set to never, PCI Express power saving are set to off.

Laptop: Samsung RF710:

http://www.samsung.com/uk/consumer/p...ype=prd_detail

Specific spec I went for:

http://www.cclonline.com/product-inf...np-rf710-s03uk

(Came with 2 500gb hard drives, think their site is wrong, swapped one for the Vertex 2 120G

Laptop open:

http://twitpic.com/3bnp7a

Stuff I have installed:

Kaspersky Internet Security 2011 (AV+Firewall+Scanner)

Firefox

Chrome

Office 2010 32bit

Visual Studio 2008 Pro

Visual Studio 2010 Pro

SQL Server 2008 R2 Developer Edition (Full everything)

NetBeans and Java JDK

.NET 2, 3.5 and 4 SDK

Zune

Dropbox

Ultramon

Skype

TortioseSVN

Notepad++

7-Zip

Performance graph of a freeze:

http://twitpic.com/3bybg7/full

[tinytomlogan]

Ive been saying for sooooo long not to touch anything they make.......

[AlienALX]

You know when you take a nice big dump and you flush it, only to find it won't quite go down the toilet?

That's OCZ that is. They've been in big trouble for a long time now and somehow they just manage to stop themselves going down the toilet.

However, buying from a company with big problems like that is a bad idea.

Also, pasting emails (not sure if you actually meant emails or forum correspondance) onto a forum is illegal and can end up with the hosts deleting forums.

Don't ask me how I know that please, but just take my word for it. It's a breach of privacy. So please, be very careful (same also goes for private messages).

Edit. Now an attempt to be helpful. Numerous SSD owners were recently complaining about terrible stuttering in Windows 7. I was one of them. Make sure you connect to windows update (yourself, don't let it) and make sure you install all the latest updates. If you search for SSD stuttering you should find the thread, if all else fails a manual fix was posted

[midnightray]

Well, I haven't posted any emails from them. Although I think your referring to the legal bit at the bottom of emails. I haven't said anything different to my forum postings.

Could you help me find the thread? I've been searching for ~8 days for a fix and don't remember that thread.

Starting to agree, OCZ seem to be blaming me or Samsung for there SSDs quirky behaviour. There are other minor little problems with the SSD which pale into comparison with the freezing.

Sleep, sleeping my laptop is a big deal, just results in a BSOD or worse, had a BSOD (blank/black screen of death).

[AlienALX]

I can't find it

Sorry mate, not laughing at you like.. I *think* Lasher posted the fix but thankfully the problem went away for me..

It's something to do with Indexing IIRC.

[AlienALX]

http://forum.overclock3d.net/index.p..._1#entry364865

[midnightray]

Meh nevermind, will hunt for it, was it definatly on OC3D?

My new plan is to get a Kingston V+ as Tom recommended, clone my OCZ onto that and laugh at OCZ when it works flawlessly then attempt to charge them for the 20-30 hours I've put into fixing it...

[AlienALX]

^ *points upward*

I found it

[midnightray]

Dunno mate, my CPU is fine. Its just every so often, probably under load (heavy read/write), the drive freezes. CPU % is fine.

Its an idea that perhaps Windows is doing some indexing stuff in the background that causes the drive to freeze, will run a process monitor program again and check for it.

[midnightray]

LOL and another guy has popped up on the OCZ forum with nearly the same problem, except his freezes are only 10 seconds rather than 30.

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/fo...b-Lockup-Issue