 SSDs: Why Get Anything Else? |
| Review Date: December 6, 2009 |
| Reviewer's Name: John M. Schutz, North Shore, Oahu |
I bought this drive to replace the 300GB Hitachi HDD in my Gateway FX laptop. I was tired of waiting f-o-r-e-v-e-r for the system to boot up and for apps and games to open. I'm thought it was largely due to Vista, but, since I had the money, I figured I would just go whole hog. I swapped out the drives and did an install of Windows 7 Ultimate. The whole install took 35 minutes. I took longer to get all the drivers straightened out, but once that was done: whoa boy! This machine really rocks thanks to the OCZ SSD. Windows 7 on my desktop system using a Velociraptor HDD isn't nearly as fast.
I originally intended to buy one of the Intel drives, but it didn't look as if they were going to come out with larger drives anytime soon, and OCZ was offering this 250GB Vertex. This goes down as the single most expensive computer component I have ever bought with the sole exception of the 30" NEC monitor on my desktop. I think it is worth every penny. ~30 seconds for start-up. Apps just open, no muss, no fuss. The Sins of a Solar Empire RTS seemed to take ages to open, load a game, and then to close down again. With this SSD it opens and gets running as fast as you can click it. No longer can I use load times as an excuse to go heat up something in the microwave or mix a drink. |
Great product once you flash it's firmware
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| Review Date: April 17, 2009 |
| Reviewer's Name: Steve Woods, COLORADO |
PLEASE NOTE: FLASH THIS DRIVE'S FIRMWARE BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING WITH IT!
Regarding an earlier post, I had difficulty upgrading the firmware in Vista 64, UNTIL i booted into Safe mode w/console. Then it flashed just fine. I saw significant performance improvements after upgrading the firmware. SMART was enabled and it solved a serious problem with BSODs after resuming from sleep. OCZ would be wise to start shipping these with the latest firmware! I wasted many hours trying to diagnose the sleep problem and then jumping through numerous hoops trying to upgrade the firmware - yes you will need a spare jumper to flash the drive.
All in all, this is a superior SSD with a 64MB cache and a smart controller to manage wear leveling. My laptop has new life after suffering from Chronic Windows Vista Bloat Syndrome. It's quite snappy now.
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STAY AWAY!!!
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| Review Date: May 6, 2010 |
| Reviewer's Name: M. Sibert, |
I purchased my drive back in September. It lasted maybe 2-3 weeks before it died. No warning. Tech Support was basically useless in that they didn't care about diagnosing the problem. To their credit, they did immediately offer to replace the drive. (Of course, I had to pay the shipping to send the drive in.)
Fast forward 8 months. The new drive suddenly died yesterday. Same response from tech support. I'll be sending this one in for replacement. More money out of pocket to send the drive to California.
Fortunately, I didn't lose any critical data either time, but I have no faith in this product. If you get one, be sure to back up your data every day. A better option is to go with a different vendor. I hear the Crucial drives are good.
If I could have given a rating of 0 stars, I would have. I'll never buy another product from OCZ again - ever. |
Yes and no...
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| Review Date: November 15, 2009 |
| Reviewer's Name: dougieb, Las Vegas, NV United States |
It lives up to its super-fast promises, however, if you have a Mac, note that they don't have a 100% working way to update the drivers.
To the company's credit, they did try and try and try different solutions, however, all of their Mac update solutions involve booting to a DOS disk, then updating the firmware from there. Nothing we tried over the course of several days worked. It was a tremendous time-suck.
Given that it takes eons to get the thing in and out of your MacBook, the idea of pulling it and installing it in a PC just to update the drivers isn't an especially inviting one either.
Wait until they have an actual Mac updater before buying this product for a Mac. |
Best Upgrade. Ever.
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| Review Date: November 11, 2009 |
| Reviewer's Name: A. Abdine, |
| I just dropped the 250gb OCZ Vertex drive into my Mid-2009 13 inch Macbook Pro and couldn't be happier with its performance. I've been building and modding my computers for 15 years now and this was the single, greatest upgrade I have ever done to any of my computers. The speed difference is tremendous. Everything is faster... loading, unloading, program opening...etc. Sure, RAM will speed up your computer, but not like this drive will. Yea, the price is ridiculous... I agree, but after seeing the difference of speed, I would liken it to buying a brand new state of the art computer to replace an old dog of a rig purchased 3 years ago. |
New life to a "rather old" MacBook Pro
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| Review Date: May 21, 2009 |
| Reviewer's Name: , |
I don't have too much to talk about this OCZ SSD. It works as expected.
What I can tell you is about the consequences of having installed it in my non-unibody MacBook Pro 15". It brought new life to it! Every app is faster now!
Guess I'll postpone the acquisition of a new notebook... |
Horrible Experience
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| Review Date: November 26, 2009 |
| Reviewer's Name: Carlos, CO,USA |
I was really happy to purchase this Solid State Disk, despite the higher than Corsair, Kingston, G.Skill or Crucial price, after all, OCZ is well known for making great components for gaming PC's ...I was truly disappointed to find out this is not the case with this product, or Mac support from OCZ.
At first I used Carbon Copy Cloner, which I have used before on other Mac's, to import all my data from my Western Digital Black HDD to this so called out performer of a SSD. Initial boot was slow, which I know is expected, since the OS has to work some magic. For the first few hours PhotoShop, Dreamweaver, Flash, Office 2008 applications, iWork, were all starting up faster than before, which made me happy; but when it came to shutting down or starting up, the performance was just like my WD Black, and in most cases much slower. After the first few hours, Microsoft Word was taking about 7 seconds to start up (not bad), Excel over 30 seconds, and all the other applications (like Adobe CS4) got slower too. Shut-down was taking over a minute, start-up was taking about a minute and 10 seconds as well, something my WD Black had never done.
Sure, this may have been a faulty drive, which is acceptable, it's normal to get a faulty computer part once in a while; however, support from OCZ is the worst ever, they expect people to go to a support forum as opposed to promoting or providing 24/7 support (which EVGA provides - an other PC company). The drive I got had the latest firmware installed, but if you visit the forum, you will see the nightmares others have had flashing the firmware - and if you own a Mac, the process is much more challenging. To top things off, this drive also caused the Sleep light on the front of my MacBook Pro (which is about 4 months old) to stop working, even though I unplugged power, unplugged the battery, got rid of any static and all that fun stuff I remember how to do from my PC days. ...so I'm going to see if the store warranty covers that, if not I'll have to buy the part, which is only $30, but still something that should not have happened.
I am glad I purchased the drive at a local retailer, so I can return it. I will follow the advice of others now, and go with Crucial, Corsair or Intel (even though Intel drives are no bigger than 160GB). ...and I'll likely have to buy it from Amazon, since my local retailer only carries OCZ and Patriot. ...anyways, that's just my experience, and I wish you luck if you do buy this drive (read the OCZ forums first - even on there you will see the nightmares others have had). |
1 Defective and 2 good ones
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| Review Date: April 6, 2009 |
| Reviewer's Name: Guy Pochard/Gabriele Wittenburg, Texas |
One drive worked briefly and then died. Became not accessible, could not be reformatted using various utilities neither under Windows nor under Mac OS. Contacted OCZ which offered to replace the defective drive. After more than 3 weeks I am still waiting for the replacement drive. The company said that they will ship as soon as product is in stock! In the meantime I am out of $800 + return cost and I have no drive...
I bought 3 drives, two are working well in a Raid 0 configuration on Mac Pro.
So far I am happy with the working drives but I am getting very frustrated with the extreme delay for the replacement |
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