Difference between OCZ SSDs

Y

yossarian

Gawd
Joined
Nov 2, 2004
Messages
799
I'm considering an SSD for upcoming Sandy Bridge build and I want a larger SSD than 128 GB. So the 160 and 180 GB drives strike a balance between size and cost. In that class the OCZ drives dominate, but there are two versions that are similarly priced but look identical in specs and performance, the Agility 2 and the Vertex 2. What's the difference between them besides about 10% cost? Are there certain versions of OCZ to avoid? I saw a complaint thread recently about OCZ drives.
 
Last edited:
Yes, avoid OCZ like the plague. There a bunch of threads here discussing how shady they've been. I would not trust any drive they have put out in the last 7-8 months or so.

Get a Corsair or Intel.

The only OCZ SSDs I could possibly recommend would be the older Agility/Vertex models, but those are few and far between.

Trust me, don't go with OCZ.
 
Red Falcon said:
Yes, avoid OCZ like the plague. There a bunch of threads here discussing how shady they've been. I would not trust any drive they have put out in the last 7-8 months or so.

Get a Corsair or Intel.

The only OCZ SSDs I could possibly recommend would be the older Agility/Vertex models, but those are few and far between.

Trust me, don't go with OCZ.
Click to expand...

On Newegg, there are literally nothing other than OCZ drives at 180 GB except for one Mushkin, and that one runs close to $400. Even the Mushkin allows only replacement, not refund. My only other alternative is a refurbished 240 GB Corsair Force at Microcenter for $300, but it only has a 30 day warranty. Maybe I can get an extended warranty at MC for a reasonable price, but I don't know the details even if they do. Maybe I should just give up the whole idea. It was a convenient time to do it because I'm reinstalling Windows anyway with the MB/CPU upgrade. The 128s are better priced with more selection, but it's just too small to hold my OS and programs. I'm already going to use the 1 TB Samsung for games. Otherwise I need to Raid two smaller drives but you lose Trim doing that and I don't know if it's worth that.
 
yossarian said:
Maybe I should just give up the whole idea.
Click to expand...

If you positively absolutely can't trim down your OS + programs installations to fit on a Crucial C300 128GB SSD or a Intel 160GB SSD or a smaller SSD, then yeah your best bet is to just give up on the whole idea. It's better than buying a subpar SSD.
 
The vertex is the more professional line of SSDs with guaranteed "high-quality" NANDs where the Agility uses somewhat cheaper NANDs. In practice both cost about the same and I would always choose the vertex line.
BTW, vertex 3 (non-pro!) should be available the next weeks. Thats an Intel-Killer... http://www.anandtech.com/show/4186/ocz-vertex-3-preview-the-first-client-focused-sf2200

And BTW, comments like "OCZ is evil company, do not buy" is not helping anybody.... The products are just fine, besides somewhat lower capacity in the newer drive and worse synthetic benchmarks, you wont ever notice any difference. IMHO this whole OCZ-bashing is just FUD and not very mature. Just my 0,02$
 
hotzen said:
And BTW, comments like "OCZ is evil company, do not buy" is not helping anybody.... The products are just fine, besides somewhat lower capacity in the newer drive and worse synthetic benchmarks, you wont ever notice any difference. IMHO this whole OCZ-bashing is just FUD and not very mature. Just my 0,02$
Click to expand...

Yeah, OCZ drastically changes the components in the Vertex 2 without changing the model number or even putting a sticker on the package. This results in a falsely advertised SSD capacity and lower performance. And your response is, oh, that's okay, no one will notice, OCZ is a good company. LOL. Yeah, right.
 
hotzen said:
The vertex is the more professional line of SSDs with guaranteed "high-quality" NANDs where the Agility uses somewhat cheaper NANDs. In practice both cost about the same and I would always choose the vertex line.
BTW, vertex 3 (non-pro!) should be available the next weeks. Thats an Intel-Killer... http://www.anandtech.com/show/4186/ocz-vertex-3-preview-the-first-client-focused-sf2200

And BTW, comments like "OCZ is evil company, do not buy" is not helping anybody.... The products are just fine, besides somewhat lower capacity in the newer drive and worse synthetic benchmarks, you wont ever notice any difference. IMHO this whole OCZ-bashing is just FUD and not very mature. Just my 0,02$
Click to expand...

It's not FUD, OCZ has severely fucked up. I was very pro-OCZ only a few months ago. Their recent shady activity and actions added to what they did about 8 years ago just killed my enthusiasm for them completely.

False advertising and hardware are not good traits.
 
Isn't the reduced capacity common to all the sandforce drives? I mean the 64 GB Adta/MC SSD formats out to 55 GB I believe. I noticed on the OCZ website they have a list of usable storage for each drive.
 
yossarian said:
Isn't the reduced capacity common to all the sandforce drives? I mean the 64 GB Adta/MC SSD formats out to 55 GB I believe. I noticed on the OCZ website they have a list of usable storage for each drive.
Click to expand...

No, the false capacity advertisement is unique to OCZ, as far as I know.

You are probably confused by GB and GiB. GB = 10^9 bytes. GiB = 1024^3 bytes. All SSDs and HDDs are advertised in GB. For some reason, Microsoft likes to display storage capacity in GiB, but incorrectly label it as GB. Your drive does not magically change capacity after it is formatted -- that is a misleading concept that needs to die already. Microsoft Windows is displaying the drive capacity in incorrect units.

There is one thing common to Sandforce drives, at least until recently, which is that some flash memory is reserved for redundancy (but some recent Sandforce controllers allow this to be disabled). So, you will see, for example, Crucial SSDs with 128GB capacity, but Sandforce drives have 120GB capacity. The lower available capacity of the Sandforce drives is due to the reserved flash used for redundancy -- both circuit boards contain the same amount of flash memory, but the Crucial has higher available capacity. That is fine since the Sandforce drives are advertised as 120GB, which they are. Except for some recent OCZ SSDs with 25nm flash, which were advertised as 120GB (or 60GB, etc.) but actually only had about 116GB available capacity (56GB).
 
Last edited:
I'm aware of stated drive sizes not being the same as formatted size. It just seemed that 64 to 55 was a larger than normal reduction compared to a conventional HD. For example my 640 GB HD is formatted to 595 GB, 7% less than stated size. The Adata comes out to 14% less than stated size.
 
yossarian said:
I'm aware of stated drive sizes not being the same as formatted size. It just seemed that 64 to 55 was a larger than normal reduction compared to a conventional HD. For example my 640 GB HD is formatted to 595 GB, 7% less than stated size. The Adata comes out to 14% less than stated size.
Click to expand...

No, once again, there is no reasonable concept of "formatted size". The capacity of a drive does not magically change after formatting. Sure, depending on partitioning and such, the available capacity of your primary partition may vary, but that is only 1MiB (or 101MiB if you count the 100MiB that Windows will sometimes reserve). But the usable capacity of the drive is still the same after formatting.

You need to learn about the difference between GB and GiB if you want to discuss this sort of thing clearly.

I am not sure what ADATA SSD you are talking about. Do you mean the S599 ? The 64GB ADATA S599 is advertised as 64GB. If that actually only has 55.9GiB of usable capacity, then ADATA is falsely advertising it, since 55.9GiB = 60GB < 64GB. Most similar Sandforce SSDs advertise 60GB of capacity. But OCZ is even worse than ADATA here, since OCZ actually lowered the usable capacity of the Vertex 2 by about 4GB without changing the model number, capacity label, or telling anyone.
 
yossarian said:
I am only concerned about how much space there is to install software. And the example I'm using is based on this post about the Microcenter SSD made by Adata: http://www.overclock.net/ssd/700674-anyone-tried-microcenter-brand-ssd-4.html#post11650551
Click to expand...

That post (in your link, #37 by TheDreadedGMan) is completely correct, both in facts presented and use of GiB and GB units. You may want to read it several times, since based on what you have written in this thread, I think you do not understand what he has written.
 
john4200 said:
Yeah, OCZ drastically changes the components in the Vertex 2 without changing the model number or even putting a sticker on the package. This results in a falsely advertised SSD capacity and lower performance. And your response is, oh, that's okay, no one will notice, OCZ is a good company. LOL. Yeah, right.
Click to expand...

Never said so. It's just industry changes (NAND nm) and companies have to adapt. OCZ did not become evil or tried to make a fast buck by producing worse SSDs and keeping the same model-numbers. It's just they are using newer NANDs now, the performance is only lower in *some* synthetic benchmarks and the capacity actually did not change: The SSD have been shipped with the statement that 20% of the capacity has to remain free, now it's expliclity reserved by the firmware. Yes, their communication/PR is fu**ed. But it does not make OCZ a bad company with shitty products which everyone tries to convince you now. FUD by kiddies that are disappointed from their favourite SSD-vendor... Nothing more, nothing less.
 
As long as OCZ has crippled their write speeds in half the original scores, and dismisses any performance difference by pointing to the ATTO fake compression benchmarks, you should not buy an OCZ product IMO.

Where OCZ Vertex 2 used to be 70MB/s it is now 35MB/s. Where it used to be 135MB/s it is now 75MB/s. So if you want a Sandforce SSD then you would want a Corsair Force to prevent getting tricked into cheap 25nm NAND and half the channel performance the Vertex originally had.

OCZ chose to trade in some of their reputation for some (much needed?) cash, to benefit from low 25nm NAND prices and being the first major manufacturer to ship that memory in one of their best selling products. Big mistake of course, and it gives you the choice: do you want the new and crippled SSD for the same amount of money? Or do you want the original product which is about twice as fast on writes. In the latter case, the Corsair Force should just be the original vertex with another sticker on it.

Also, there is no more overprovisioning (spare space) as i've been told in OCZ forums. The lost space is only due to redundancy (RAISE) and that the 25nm NAND uses only half the channels. With half the channels, having a RAID5 like redundancy layer would also waste more space than the full 8 channel models.

The conclusion to me is just that OCZ made a huge risk with their successful Vertex product, where they made alot of money by switching to 25nm NAND so early, at the cost of the product people get. 35MB/s write speed and then they point to 250MB/s+ zero-write figures in ATTO. I guess even at 1MB/s you still could get such high zero-write compression scores. I don't think that product is worth its money. You buy the cheaper NAND but you don't get a cheaper price; you only get 'cheaper performance' for the same bucks.

So i can actually recommend to avoid OCZ for now. Now like there's anything special of OCZ; they just sell Sandforce drives for cheap. Since they now don't give you what you want, consider buying from one of the money other Sandforce OEMs that print their sticker on the SSD and sell it under their own brand. To me those are just Sandforce SSDs; and you can see them as Vertexes if you like.
 
john4200 said:
That post (in your link, #37 by TheDreadedGMan) is completely correct, both in facts presented and use of GiB and GB units. You may want to read it several times, since based on what you have written in this thread, I think you do not understand what he has written.
Click to expand...

I know exactly what is being said. Some "64 GB" drives have 55.92 GiB usable space and others have 59.6 GiB usable space. All I'm trying to find out is if the controller type is why the difference or just different marketing methods. It makes a significant difference when you're squeezing an OS and programs into a small drive or drives. But never mind, I'll look for the information elsewhere.
 
yossarian said:
All I'm trying to find out is if the controller type is why the difference or just different marketing methods. It makes a significant difference when you're squeezing an OS and programs into a small drive or drives. But never mind, I'll look for the information elsewhere.
Click to expand...

You've already been answered twice, here, and in the link you referenced.
 
I just bought an OCZ Vertex 2 E. I didn't read about the shift to 25nm until afterwards. I just looked at reviews and they were great. I'm pissed that they didn't change the name of the product so I could tell the old reviews didn't apply.

Anyway my question is if there is any real world difference. have anyone tested booting up windows 7 and using the drive for during a normal day and detected a noticble difference? I see a lot of difference in benrhmarks, but it's a 60GB drive and I'll mostly only use it for Windows and necessary programs like Chrome, iTunes etc.

Even if there is a difference it will still be quite fast compared to what I'm used to right? I've never used an SSD before and only used 7200rpm drives. Right now I have windows on a 640GB WD (that was one of the fastest 7200rpm drives when I bouht it).

EDIT: Should I update the firmware to 1.29? It says that it cannot be upgraded when Windows is installed so if I'm going to do it it has to be done before I install Windows, but looking at the changelog there seems to be only one minor bugfix in1.29 compared to 1.28. Tomshardware claimed that the performance could be improved by more efficient error correction, when will this more efficient firmwire come out, if ever?
 
dagas, there is definitely a difference, and it isn't so much that the SSD itself is totally bad, it's OCZ that is failing as a company to be honest and straight forward with their customer-base.

My Agility 60GB was a huge upgrade over my 250GB WD Blue laptop drive, so you should still see a noticeable gain, even if the the actual speeds are less than what was advertised.

As for the firmware, that's up to OCZ and with they way they have been, I would seriously not count on it being released, at least any time soon.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top