Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This drive is built with a SandForce 2281 chip which has a hardware bug. For many users, myself included, this will randomly cause your computer to crash with the blue screen of death. For me, it used to happen every few weeks now it happens every few days. When this problem happens the hard drive will seem to disappear from your computer until you power it off and on again (reset does nothing, because you have to actually cut power to the SandForce 2281 in the drive). Not everyone sees the bug - it looks like the exact configuration of some computers triggers it much more easily. For the technically minded, each system generates different access patterns to the hard drive and only some patterns will trigger the bug. Corsair also used this chip in their products and encountered the exact same problem. They issued a recall back in June. The popular AnandTech hardware review site has reproduced this problem and a description of it appears on the first page of their latest review of drives using the SandForce 2281 chip. SandForce has offered to fly in engineers if AnandTech can figure out how to reproduce it more quickly. Unlike Corsair, OCZ simply lied to all their customers, claiming their issue had nothing to do with the SandForce issue that prompted Corsair to issue a recall, and can be fixed in firmware. Note that "their" firmware is just a renamed version of the SandForce firmware, because the chip manufacturer is the one who writes the firmware controlling the chip. However, after months of firmware updates the problem still occurs. I haven't even applied the updates personally, I'm just going by the word of all the other people who say they've made no difference. This is because the firmware update process is obscene. They do NOT provide an update program that works from a CD or flash drive. This means that you have to remove the drive from your computer, install it in another Windows PC, and update it from that PC. Given the large number of firmware updates, that's a lot of times to ask a friend to borrow the inside of their computer. It gets worse. At least some of the firmware updates are "destructive", meaning they erase all data on the drive. So you have to reinstall everything, or be savvy enough to make a disk image backup of your hard disk and then restore it after updating. The SandForce 2281 problems aren't the fault of the companies selling the drives, although SandForce is a fairly modestly sized startup and they obviously can't afford to test their chips thoroughly enough. It's probably possible to fix the chip and manufacture updated versions within a couple of months, but there is zero public indication that SandForce has fixed the error. In the future I will avoid all products using SandForce chips unless they've been in the market for many months without reported problems, because they have demonstrated they don't have the resources to properly verify and validate their products and address post-silicon bugs. It's not like this is the only bug found with their chip or drivers, but the others are small in comparison. OCZ, on the other hand... I will never buy another OCZ product. Their "support" actively lies to customers to avoid doing a recall like their competition. They string everyone along with the promise that the next firmware update will fix it, really, despite that promise always turning out wrong. (Note: I have a little technical knowledge in this area, and suspect that if they could work around this bug in firmware it would probably involve slowing down the drive quite a bit, which would be incredibly unpopular with users who haven't encountered the bug). I was *amazed* that a hard disk manufacturer doesn't offer a bootable update CD to update firmware without putting the drive in another machine. That is just nuts. In many years using many computers, I have never had to do that before. I'm not going through firmware update hell. I am buying another SSD. This expensive choice will allow me to install it in my system and seamlessly transfer my files to the new drive. After that I will wait for a fix for the OCZ drive, and if one comes I will apply it or RMA it and give it to a friend or sell it for a modest amount. SandForce 2281 based drives are unfortunately the fastest out there, but I am now buying the latest Intel drive (the 510) based on a Marvell chip. It is maybe 10-20% slower in benchmarks (via AnandTech), but Intel has a reputation for rock solid drives and they work to maintain it. They have a three year warranty on drives and have recently upgraded a smaller drive (the 320) to five years. A French reseller recently revealed that SSDs are returned to them at a 2-3% rate, except for Intel SSDs which are returned at about a 0.6% rate. The Crucial m4 is also based on the same Marvell chip used by the latest Intel drives. It benchmarks faster than the Intel drive, but Crucial doesn't have the 0.6% return rate. It's still competitive with the OCZ with much lower risk. Oh, another annoyance: the drive's 3.5" mounting bracket lacked some of the standard screw holes that my case happens to require, and wouldn't fit into a 3.5 to 5.25 inch adapter I bought either. I had to buy a special 3.5" adapter and put that in the 5.25" adapter.