Upgrade to SSD = Fail

armchair said:

...My problem is drive controllers failing ...

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Which OCZ is kind of famous for. While they are equally well known for some of the best performing SSDs on the market, much of that is due to their aggressive firmware tweaking, often at the expense of longevity and/or reliability.

Another concern I have in your situation is whether you've tweaked XP at all for the SSD. Specifically, have you disabled automated defragmentation?

Although I can't comment on it from a longevity standpoint as I've only had it since December, but my Crucial M4 has been rock solid thus far. I will be sure to comment back here on this thread in 6 months.

If you do decide to go with another SSD, you may want to consider OCZ's Mercury Aura Pro line, which uses enterprise-class NAND, with a longer lifetime rating.

SSD = Fail

the first ssd i installed i went through the palava of using diskpart to align the partition on 1mb boundary as the os couldnt do it ( xp ). i then installed xp on it, then setup my applications and did a database build - after 47 hrs the drive was stuttering so badly it was useless, and a reformat didnt improve matters. nb. i always turn defrag off as in my experience it doesnt really improve drive performance that much - time is better spent reformatting and reinstalling operating system.

returned to ocz who sent me the next model up, and installed xp on it although didnt bother with the partition realignment as i came to the conclusion it didnt improve things. used it faultlessly for compiling the odd application here and there and a couple small database builds ( no stuttering ) for 11 months until i turned on the machine and the bios no longer detects the drive.

third ssd is a ocz vertex ( sep 2011 ) with xp and photoshop installed, again no attempt to change partition alignment for the same reason as before. 3 months later my friend phones up saying his computer no longer boots - again the bios no longer detects the drive. its rma'd replacement is sitting in its box waiting for me to install it - but i told him i'll only install it if he uses it for nothing other than his photoshop scratch disk.

somehow i dont think ill be buying anything else with the word 'ocz' written on it, and im kind of thinking that the marriage of flash memory and disk based operating system is just a bad dream. but i will try a different brand and a TRIM os and see if one day i am able to tell customers that ssd is a viable option.

armchair said:

somehow i dont think ill be buying anything else with the word 'ocz' written on it, and im kind of thinking that the marriage of flash memory and disk based operating system is just a bad dream. but i will try a different brand and a TRIM os and see if one day i am able to tell customers that ssd is a viable option.

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I don't think it's just a bad dream. SSDs are being used, not just in personal systems, but in Enterprise-class RAID arrays on servers in environments that would normally be torturous on rotational media. It really depends greatly on the quality of the controller, the quality of the NAND chips that provide the storage and the configuration of the OS.

In your case, your experience is very narrowly focused on a single product line. So, it's a gross generalization to state that all SSDs are unreliable.

This is the flip side of forum. Often times it helps a lot of us with troubleshooting and what not. Then there are times like what's going on with this thread, is that it create panic for some. And consequently may cause others looking into switching to SSD to missed out on the technology by reading these extreme posts on SSD. I've installed a OCZ Vertex Plus on my 2010 MBP 13 the past month with no problem what so ever. Fast, easy, and working great. Bought it off the shelf at CompUsa.

Reminds me of the same panic posts regarding DVD-R technology when people were saying they were ruining their dvd drives.

Any SSD has a limited lifespan (writes, reads, deletes etc), there's a thread on xtremesystems.org (can't find link right now) about users testing lot's of different SSD and at what point they fail and errors shown.