Ouch. Not a huge deal for how I use SSDs currently as secondary drives for various data that makes use of the speed, bit I'd be pretty upset if I had to reinstall my OS due to bad firmware, even from a backup.

These companies really need to improve their quality control on new releases.

The controller chips used in these SSDs don't seem to have a particularly long product life as they're constantly being replaced with something newer and faster. This mad push means they just don't really care that much about older products it seems.

The latest OCZ drives don't even use an Indilinx controller anymore. They've gone to the Sandforce controllers now which seem to have some dubious practices. If you have one of their lower end controller and apply one of the firmware upgrades, it ends up capping your performance so it doesn't compete against their higher end controllers.

Reinstalled everything and got another corrupt file. I'm going to put a regular HD back into the laptop now. This OCZ Vertex is just too unreliable for me and OCZ/Indilinx don't seem to know what is going on. The trigger appears to be v1.5 of the firmware however as I was using v1.3 with no problems for months. You don't get any warning that it is silently corrupting your filesystem. It isn't cheap either although that isn't an excuse since it shouldn't be doing this anyway.

Looking at Newegg's reviews you would get the idea that the MTBF is a lot lower than what is typically stated.

I wonder just how many SSDs Newegg has shipped and taken back in return?

Dunno. But they sell a LOT of stuff, and get a LOT of returns of most everything, or so it seems.

I've had nine SSDs here now. Six have worked flawlessly, three of those in very hard service for some time now.

One died completely shortly after arrival, and got returned. Its replacement (different brand/model) has been perfection.

Another, my original 120GB Vertex, lost everything once, but has been flawless since being reflashed with newer firmware, and is still my main "everything" drive.

Cheers

Woohoo!

Lookie what showed up at DX today!
2.5" IDE Male to SATA Female PCB Adapter
Price: $7.80

Pity they got the wrong sex on the SATA connector, though.
Oh, waitasec.. that's the right sex for what most of us need it for.. duh!

EDIT: ordered one!

Sigh! I'll bet the MTBE numbers are based on the assumption that the item is properly constructed.

It's hard to accept that items are sent out with only a successful POST. With the understanding that it cheaper to let the customers sort it out the ones that fail to burn in.

I did finally order and receive an SSD.
I bought the OCZ AGILITY 2 120GB (OCSSSD2-2AGTE120G)

Now I need to find my multihead usb adapter cable so I can clone the system drive.

Before you put your data on it, check the firmware revision. Upgrade to whatever the latest is, at all costs!!

The "latest" should be 1.23 1.24. It was the release immediately before that which went DOA on me on the first day.

So, UPGRADE the FIRMWARE first!

On the plus side, with these Sandforce controller drives, the upgrades are non-destructive, so anything on the drive (backed up elsewhere for safety, though), is not normally erased by the firmware upgrade.

-ml

EDIT: correction, latest firmware is now v1.24, available from here.

Are there any issues to be aware of when cloning a HHD to a SSD?

Yes, as you want your file system boundaries to line up with the blocks on the SSD.

I forget the exact details though, think we've discussed it before.

When partitioning the drive, ensure the first partition begins at a multiple of 8-sectors (4096 bytes) on the drive. The default for MS-DOS/MS-XP and many Linux distros is an offset of 63, which is WRONG. I use 64 instead.

Cheers

Yes, but I can't find the dang USB adapter I BOUGHT ONLY TWO MOS. AGO. Blast! Durn-it.

BTW Before I go buy another. Would any one care to recommend a different/better adapter than the one linked.

Just buy the cheapest USB-SATA notebook drive enclosure you can find. Eg. $5-6 at DealExtreme. Remove/keep the innards, and toss the enclosure.

That's what I use.

-ml

Here are a few different items to check out on Newegg. I bought the ICY Dock MB881U-1S-1 for a friend as a Xmas gift last year and he loves it. At work I have a docks that looks like the Rosewill but it also has a fan just behind the HD to help keep it cool. If I was buying one of these today I would get a dual drive dock.

Good find! Just ordered one. With the colder weather my original drive is starting to act up, so I'm planning to pair this adapter with either an OCZ Agility 2 60GB or 90GB SSD, or possibly the 90G Vertex 2 SSD. This will be my first empeg/SSD experience; recommendations and advice from those that have been down this path would be greatly appreciated.

So do these run much cooler than a standard hard drive ? I would expect so with them having no moving parts.

The ones I have here run pretty much "cold".
But they also can tolerate much more heat than a mechanical drive,
which is important for notebooks and empeg installs.

The electronics are generally spec'd for up to 75C,
whereas a mechanical drive normally says 50-55C.

Most SSDs say 0.5W (or less) when idle, and ~1W when "active".
Mechanical drives usually are in the 2-2.5W "active" range.


Cheers

I am trying to get a very quiet pretty small desktop pc so I am thinking getting one of these to run the OS on might be a good idea. Plus it sounds like a pretty good performance boost which is always nice.

Never mind Wikileaks -- look at this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/10/flash_fails_more_than_hdd/ (par ici)

Peter

Wow. I'm not sure how much you can trust numbers from a retailer. I imagine many drives are returned that aren't broken at all. Also, it seems that many SSD failures don't involve a return, but merely a complete loss of data.

I did forget to update to the 1.24 version. The drive had 1.23 on it.

The release notes don't seem to show a pressing reasons to update.

The drive that suddenly died (completely) for me here, had 1.22 on it.
I'm told that 1.23 == 1.22 for all intents and purposes.

-ml

ouch! Ok, I'll crack the case again. Thanks for the heads up.

Although, bizarrely, the OCZ Vertex 2 60G disk that I just picked up yesterday claims to have 1.25 on it already...

This OCZ forum post says that except for the support of additional drive sizes, 1.24=1.25.

Well, I tried to update the firmware 1.23>1.24

Pulled the drive from the macbook pro, attached to a W7X64 machine. No joy.

The drive and it's partition scheme showed in the W7 drive management dialog, but the firmware updater could not find the drive. Tried attachment both via sata and usb.

Looks like I'll have to build a spare drive up with W7x32.