What does Tom have against OCZ?

Willock

New member
What's wrong with OCZ?

So I made my weekly Facebook check today, and saw that Tom posted this:

So we all have our favourite brand, but what's your worst and why? I personally don't have time for OCZ or Thermaltake, far too many reasons why but they both make me feel dirty *shudders*
I've had the feeling Tom had something against OCZ when he notably omitted them from his recommendations for PSUs and SSDs in a couple of his videos; So my question is does anyone know why?

I've had LOADS of OCZ products in the past and they've ALWAYS been great quality and have good customer service, as well as being well priced.

With that in mind, and also keeping in mind that TTL is a cool guy who doesn't afraid of corporations, all I could guess is that they refused to send him review samples or something after he gave them a bad review so he doesn't talk about them? I don't know. I also don't know what to think about him publicly calling them out on his Facebook page... I don't want him to damage his rep with other manufacturers.

INB4 I work for OCZ; No I don't. And I'm not a fanboy.
 
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OCZ power supplies

I've had 2 ocz psu's, both died within 6 months.

I've never RMA'd ram or any SSD's from them though.
 
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Maybe that's because you don't use high end rigs? I wouldn't dare powering an expensive computer with an OCZ power supply. Also, their SSDs have the highest failure/return rates on the market. I remember someone sent me a diagram and one OCZ SSD had a fail rate of literally over 40%

Pretty sure not all their products suck, but once your company gets associated with stats like that... Well, you're fooked.
 
OCZ PSUs have had a pretty bad reputation at times, particularly for frying your PC when they went, as have their RAM modules, and the Vertex 3 SSDs, which I guess is why TTL doesn't like them. Personally I have had more Corsair stuff go wrong than OCZ (one set of Corsair RAM, two PSUs, one SSD), but if you have been burned by one company consistently you are more likely to dislike them. (I should note that I have used about 10 Corsair PSUs over the years, and 8 sets of Corsair RAM so that failure rate isn't awful, especially as one of the PSUs I think was killed by the cleaner).

Thermaltack on the other hand (as an owner of some TT stuff) is pretty awful compared to other hardware manufacturers.
 
I have had a Vertex IV for about 8 months from before I'd heard anything bad about them and it's been great so far, so maybe I just got lucky or something, I probably won't risk getting another OCZ SSD, I think I'm getting Corsair Force GT(s) next
 
I've had a Vertex III for quite a while and that has been fine. Only early models were affected IIRC.
 
Maybe that's because you don't use high end rigs? I wouldn't dare powering an expensive computer with an OCZ power supply. Also, their SSDs have the highest failure/return rates on the market. I remember someone sent me a diagram and one OCZ SSD had a fail rate of literally over 40%

Pretty sure not all their products suck, but once your company gets associated with stats like that... Well, you're fooked.

Well I'd be interested in seeing those figures, but in terms of "I don't run a high end enough system", I've put together a gallery of my setup.

I have an ES 2500k clocked at 4.8GHz with a custom watercooling loop, a P8P67 MB w/8GBs Mushkin Blackline 1866 RAM, a 2x1TB Raid 0 Array and 2 SSDs (Boot is OCZ), a reference Zotac GTX 680, and ALL is powered by a 3 YEAR OLD OCZ StealthxStream2 600W.
 
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Having owned 3 OCZ SSD's - They suck. Very unreliable, they fail very fast. That company just doesn't know what they are doing in my opinion.
 
I think they're fine but not high quality. HardOCP hammers and I mean HAMMERS on the stuff they review and OCZ usually doesn't come out the other end like a Seasonic, Corsair, Kingwin or even Enermax (but they've been pedestrian lately it seems). Their SSD's never do that we'll in tests either although their new Vertex 3.0 drives seem to be better.

So yeah, I don't think they suck necessarily but I just don't consider them high end like a Seasonic power supply or a Plextor SSD.
 
They were great in the RAM days but their venture into consumer SSD's didn't do them any favours is all, it doesn't take many defective product lines to give a company a bad reputation. And when two of those are SSD's and PSU's (regardless of how long your single psu has lived) it has damaged them as a brand
 
Again, one person's experience with a product only counts for like 0.0000001% (guestimate) of the product brand as a whole. You may have had 3 drives, but when 40% (if that's true) of the rest of the batch of however many thousand, fail.. that adds up.

Sometimes we're just lucky. And of course ultimately, sometimes you're unlucky.

Oftentimes it's the people having issues that shout the loudest because if you don't have a problem with something you don't go on a forum and rave about it, because you're getting what you expect, something that works.

it's just that in the case of OCZ the numbers were so high, that everyone noticed.
 
The later Vertex 3s seem to be OK, mine has been going strong, and I've not seen as many reports of catastrophic failure out there. I guess just back up to make sure though.

Then again I think that goes for everything :(
 
I had an OCZ PSU and it was screeching all the time and failed relatively soon, but the Vertex 2 I still have is still going strong ;)
 
My OCZ Vertex 3 works very well and it gaved me no trouble since 1 year and an half... I hope it continues doing its job or I going to miss a friend :)
 
Yeah it depends on the product really.

Some of their lines - like the Agility 3s had around a 15% return rate. RAID two together, and that's then a 30% chance that your system will fail and you'll lose all your data.

I've not heard many complete horror stories recently, but there's no way I'd buy an OCZ product now before they've had several years of very positive reviews.
 
Like everything else things evolve... I think sometimes we get too hung up on image. All companies produce defective components - some manage that better than others...

I personally had 2 * vertex 2 in raid 0 for over 2 years and they never missed a beat...
 
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