OCZ Shipping 25nm SSDs, customers not happy over lack of change?

[dietcokefiend]

Man now you are starting to scare me...though WEI is useless, it only rates my SSD @ 5.9 with latest IRST, when my old 30 GB Vertex on my i7 desktop is a 6.9.

When I go home from work, I'll run Crystal Disk Mark on it...

Is there a way to tell from the SSD the fab?

Looking at the official announcement on the OCZ forums, the quick and dirty way to figure out what revision you have without opening the case is two things; firmware and formatted capacity. 1.28 = 25nm... 1.27 and below= 34nm. You will also notice an abnormally low formatted capacity. For the 120GB size I think you would be seeing 107-108GB now where you would have seen 111-112GB formatted before.

CDM might not help much unless you had to models side by side in similar condition. The only *sure* thing is formatted capacity and firmware version.

Oh and their trade-in program is a joke. Yea whoops we didn't tell you what drive you bought, but hey if you want to trade it in for the better version, just pay us extra.

EDIT:

For those customers that have already purchased an “E” part and wish to move to a 32 Gbit die
based drive solution, OCZ will offer a program in which customers can trade in their “E” drive
and receive a credit towards the more expensive 32 Gbit die‐based drives. Customers only need
to pay the difference in the raw NAND price and OCZ will ship the replacement drive once the
original “E” drive is received. If you are interested in an exchange please contact an OCZ
customer service representative and we will be happy to assist you.

It will be VERY interesting to see how this plays out for them with the FTC. These drives are being sold as higher capacity and faster speed than actually are.

[chimpanzee]

Looking at the official announcement on the OCZ forums, the quick and dirty way to figure out what revision you have without opening the case is two things; firmware and formatted capacity. 1.28 = 25nm... 1.27 and below= 34nm. You will also notice an abnormally low formatted capacity. For the 120GB size I think you would be seeing 107-108GB now where you would have seen 111-112GB formatted before.

CDM might not help much unless you had to models side by side in similar condition. The only *sure* thing is formatted capacity and firmware version.

Oh and their trade-in program is a joke. Yea whoops we didn't tell you what drive you bought, but hey if you want to trade it in for the better version, just pay us extra.

Luckily, it only happens very recently so everyone can just use the 30 days return policy. They explanation of 34nm NAND spot price is sky rocketing is a very fishy way to explain why use higher density die when they LATER said the replacements would use same density die of 25nm. But knowing these guys(have a bit of conversation with them when I briefly had Vertex 2), that didn't surprise me.

[dietcokefiend]

Luckily, it only happens very recently so everyone can just use the 30 days return policy. They explanation of 34nm NAND spot price is sky rocketing is a very fishy way to explain why use higher density die when they LATER said the replacements would use same density die of 25nm. But knowing these guys(have a bit of conversation with them when I briefly had Vertex 2), that didn't surprise me.

Well 30-day window isn't available from everyone. Even big retailers like NewEgg will NOT offer any refund period on SSDs. 30-day replacement, no window for refund. You are stuck with it.

[chimpanzee]

Well 30-day window isn't available from everyone. Even big retailers like NewEgg will NOT offer any refund period on SSDs. 30-day replacement, no window for refund. You are stuck with it.

that is strange but I haven't dealt with newegg so I don't know. I returned my OCZ to tigerdirect without any problem(though not 30 days but more like 2days). Cost me the shipping charge but I am glad that it failed so early.

[dietcokefiend]

Yea depends on which place you bought it. Amazon you could probably return it melted in half from "fire damage" as long as you paid return shipping

[Tsunade_Hime]

Thanks Kevin, I will go home and look it up. I will post up my benchmarks later.

[Torai]

Even though this is a pretty new issue, a lot of customers have been complaining on their forum. It seems to me that OCZ forum admins are trying to make excuses. But, for whatever reasons, changing from 34nm to 25nm without any notice to customers was a bad thing to do.
Now a lot of customers would never go back to OCZ again I guess.

complaint about 25nm SSD drives

[Greg]

The smaller capacity drive also has a rated P/E cycle count of 3000, down from the previous 5000. So the SSD basically has 40% lesser longevity...and there is no way that an extra ~5GB spare scratch area is going to make up for that.

It is only the 2nd time they've silently changed the specs on their SSDs. The first time they dropped the P/E rating down to 5000, from 10000! They didn't pass on the cost savings then either.

OCZ is absolute trash, and I would never buy from them again. They don't support people who have problems with their OCZ RAM (with RMA times sometimes exceeding 60 days) and I've had three unstable SSDs from them that I was glad to have gotten rid of.

OCZ has a history of playing hardball. Storage Review was banned from OCZ's list of reviewers that got samples (link), specifically because SR complained about drive stability and re-reviewed the SSD with OCZ-supplied updated firmware that had slightly lesser performance. Seriously?

The only time I had the pleasure of working with OCZ's customer support was when my two 60GB drives were unstable in RAID1. It was absolutely impossible that the SSD could be wrong! They pretty much refused to believe their SSD could possibly be imperfect. The last 'conversation' I had with them...they asked me about my RAM being a potential problem (also unfortunately OCZ hahaha) and after that I just got rid of the drives after firmware updates seemed to solve the stability issues.

[chimpanzee]

those are not just OCZ forum admins, they are OCZ employee. A bunch of 'kids'(not age but they way they behave).

[Crimsoned]

I figured this day would happen.

Typically after refreshes like 45-32 there is always a reduction in cost for the product, OR at the least the same cost but more space.

This is outright greed on behalf of OCZ. They reduce the amount of nand needed, increase the amount of back up nand needed, and keep the price the same. They have cut production costs, cut packaging costs, and kept the price the same while offering a technically inferior product.