Re: The exception that proved the rule
Right before OCZ went bust and were bought by Toshiba, and after they garnered the worst reputation in the business, they started flogging off factory refurbs of their most problematic drives - Vertex 3 and 4 - for basically nothing. I think I paid £30 for a 128GB Vertex 3 and £60 for a 240GB Vertex 4.
The Vertex 3 I use as an adaptive read cache for a ZFS array - if it fails, the system doesn't care one jot; I can even un-plug it and plug it back in without applications noticing. This one has never failed.
The Vertex 4 I used as the OS drive on my desktop. It worked fine for three months, and then the firmware wedged if you tried to do random access - sequential access was fine, so I could move all my data off there with a simple "dd". By this point, OCZ no longer existed, and besides which, the 3 month warranty was up. I asked Toshiba if I could RMA it, they said yes, and they sent me a brand new Tosiba branded Vertex 460, which thankfully has not failed even once.
SSDs are much more complex beasties than mechanical disks, their firmware does a lot more work than the firmware in a HDD. I have no evidence, but I think the OCZ problems were mainly down to crappy firmware. Hopefully now Toshiba are on board, things are a little better.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
