I got two good friends of mine sucked into the idea of running an SSDs. They chose to use the OCZ Vertex 250 GB. This was back in April. This is when their version of Hell started.
I’d posted about these drives before and these looked like a great alternative to the super-expensive Intel drives. Well, the short version is, stick to the Intel drives. These drives self-destructed repeatedly in their Macbook Pro’s. The data would simply get corrupted. Months of back-n-forth with OCZ proved fruitless. Their RMA process was the worst I’ve ever seen, taking over a month to move a drive from customer premises to vendor or vice-versa. Their tech support was slow, clueless, and never bothered trying to ask how to reproduce the problem. A new set of drives were shipped, and they exploded just the same. OCZ continued to claim they can’t reproduce the problem, but never took up the offer on how to reliably reproduce the problem using the customer’s input. At this point, $1600 tied up, my friends are understandably irritated, and asking for a different solution — ship a different model or refund the money. OCZ of course first opted for a different model. Well, after another month of waiting for turnaround (they have my friend’s drives during this time) and constant “where is my drive? what’s the status?”, OCZ finally comes back and says “sorry, the model we were going to ship you is discontinued.” So, they shipped a third set of Vertex drives — tested, formatted, etc. My friend plugs it in, and after writing the directory entry for “/” during the OSX install, the drive puked. It doesn’t even show up as formatted anymore. Naturally my friend is furious, and wants a refund. He pulls the drive out, and comes to find that the “warranty void” sticker is pierced and the screws were clearly “used” — strange to say the least. My friend learns the engineers were manually wrangling with the drive for some reason prior to shipping it — presumably to make sure the drive was OK. At this point, we’re into September —5 months into the ordeal. My friends managed to convince OCZ to issue a refund. It will probably be another 2 months before they see the check.
Maybe their other products work fine. Maybe the Vertex works fine on a Windows PC. Who knows. But I can tell you I’ll never buy OCZ (obviously neither will they) after that disgusting excuse for customer support.
I’m sticking with Intel. My X25-e continues to perform flawlessly (I’ve had it since ~March).
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