OCZ 25nm NAND in Vertex 2's

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Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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Beyond posting about OCZ's swap from 34nm to 25nm NAND on Friday, it looks like OCZ has another response that basically offers, for a price, to upgrade to faster 34nm drives.

I have to say, as someone that advises much larger storage players, this is becoming a fiasco solely because OCZ does not re-name/ badge the Vertex 2 25nm drives Vertex 2 SE or something. The "E" designation in the model number apparently does not guarantee 25nm vs 34nm flash either according to that tread.

For a small player in the storage market, OCZ really needs to fix this soon or they are in for trouble. Unlike the larger players, OCZ does not make NAND and basically cannot get in a price war with the big guys because Samsung, Intel, Micron and etc. can just bleed margin to squeeze OCZ. (OCZ by the way just secured a $25m loan with Silicon Valley bank last week.)

Still with negative EBITDA, and under $160M in revenue, OCZ needs to figure out customer service and scale before one of the big guys decides to take OCZ's market.

Anyone else following this?
 

odditory

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Dec 23, 2010
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Heard about it, not following it. Once I experienced a Crucial C300, and then four in RAID0 on an Areca 1880i (1400MB/s reads), everything else ceased to exist. Multiple C400's will be my next SSD purchase, everything else seems to be struggling with problems and pushing their release dates further and further back. SF-2000 has turned into a real headache according to insiders because its got major performance problems "in the lab".

I have four OCZ drives, two are dead (both 30GB Vertex2), a third just died yesterday (Summit 128GB). Not exactly a scientific study but damn.
 
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nitrobass24

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Dec 26, 2010
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Yea i must say i haven't been thrilled with my OCZ SSD products Ive owned either, but i was definitely underwhelmed when i had my Intel X25 160GBs too, so im not sure what I want to do. Might just ride out my existing Vertex's until someone gets their shit together.
 

PigLover

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Jan 26, 2011
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I've got 10 Vertex 60GB drives and (until recently) they've been outstanding. Very happy with them, especially since they were the first ones to get the Indilinix garbage collection working correctly for applications without TRIM - like running in a Raid configuration.

My main video editing rig uses 4xVertex 60GBs in Raid-0 under an Areca controller. Its been rock solid for a year, blazing fast and quite satisfying. About three weeks ago one of them died and my backup/imaging paranoia finally paid off. Got it replaced under warrenty, no issues, then last night had another one die. I'm wondering if they are just hitting end-of-life together? That would not be good...

Holding off buying any more SSDs for a while, OCZ or otherwise, as the landscape is just changing too darn fast.
 

Patrick

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Did you check the cycles used? I wonder if you hit the 5,000 P/E limit. If so, it would indicate a reason for the clustered failures and more to come.

I use two 120GB Vertex drives in my main system for the reason you mention. The 4K speed difference is easy to see in benchmarks but not so much real world.
 

PigLover

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Jan 26, 2011
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I can't check the cycles used because the dead drives are completely dead. Since the array is currently FUBAR I'll pull one of the working drives tonight and give it a look.

As for the speed difference, Its definitely snappier with windows & programs on the array. But the real difference - a real world, non benchmark difference that has meaningful work-time benefit - is an almost 40% improvement in video render times in both Sony Vegas and Adobe Premier when you map the temp directories onto the SSD array. I guess that could also be an intense enough use to hit the cycle limit early...I'll have to look into that more.
 

Patrick

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Usually exceeding the cycle limit leaves cells read-only so they would hopefully not be "dead". Then again, I am with you on holding off on purchasing new SSDs for the time being and eagerly awaiting 3rd generation drives.