Another Victim of OCZ

[sm625]

So I just finished my state taxes and took the forms to my work pc and printed them. When I get home my PC doesnt boot. So I lost the last 2 months of emails and the electronic copies of my federal taxes, and a couple other things.

What drive was I using? Yep it was an OCZ. An agaility 2. Stuck at "detecting SATA". After a year it just quits with no warning at all. Is there any way to get the data off this POS?

I will celebrate when this company goes out of business.

 

[alaricljs]

Paying a stack of cash for a data recovery company to determine whether or not they can get the data off and then paying through the nose for the data.

I had a similar experience w/ my Vertex 2... and now I am a backup nazi. Make backups, often. For the system where this happened I do a 100% backup every week and take snapshots of my data every 4 HOURS.

 

[birthdaymonkey]

It's pretty easy to just sync your office files to the cloud and there are numerous free and secure options. While I'm no OCZ fan, this is your bad.

As I've seen posted many times on these forums in the past: data that's not backed up is already lost.

 

[Fallengod]

Yeah.. That sucks

If you are unaware, many users still dont use SSD's because of their reliability. I would have never purchased an OCZ SSD myself....that is just crazy. And, as the others stated, you should always find a way to backup important data. I use a slave drive for backing up any important stuff. However, I will say I do not normally update more often than every 6 months or so, so this would still not fix an issue.

In addition to this, its a bit smarter to not use isp emails and such, you should use gmail or something webhosted so you dont have to worry about "losing" emails.... Who the hell wants to have to remember to "save" emails when you reformat or have a drive die.

 

[ControlD]

I have been through pretty much the same thing with my Agility 2 at least half a dozen times. I have however been able to get data from the drive when I needed to (I learned to keep an up-to-date Acronis image at all times after the first failure though). What I found in my case was that even though the drive was unable to boot Windows, I could mount and see the drive under OS X (my desktop is a dual boot Windows 7 / Snow Leopard machine). I never tried it, but I imagine I would have been able to do the same thing with a Ubuntu live image as well. I also had the symptom of being stuck at the SATA detection, but a full power off of the system will sometimes allow the drive to be detected again.

I don't have a link to it right now, but someone at the OCZ forums created a Linux based bootable toolbox for most (if not all) of the OCZ SSDs. There is an excellent chance that your drive isn't dead at all. Every time I have had my Agility 2 stop working, a secure erase has brought it back to life and functioning like normal. The downside of course is that you will lose all of your data.

I agree with your frustration however. I will never buy an OCZ or Sandforce based product again.

 

[Blain]

So I just finished my state taxes and took the forms to my work pc and printed them. When I get home my PC doesnt boot. So I lost the last 2 months of emails and the electronic copies of my federal taxes, and a couple other things.

What drive was I using? Yep it was an OCZ. An agaility 2. Stuck at "detecting SATA". After a year it just quits with no warning at all. Is there any way to get the data off this POS?

I will celebrate when this company goes out of business.

It's a good thing you didn't abandon spinning platters for backups.
There is a way to get your data back, but it will cost more than the drive did to begin with.

 

[VirtualLarry]

You should always have two, or preferably more copies of anything important. Otherwise, you are just tempting fate.

 

[GrumpyMan]

That's right ^^^^...you even need a back up drive for the back up drive. I lost my WD 750g (not a black) back up drive last Friday with no warning. Fortunately my most important stuff was backed up to DVDs. A pain of course, but hey, still have my most important stuff now on the WD Black new back up drive.

Edit: I have an Intel 510 SSD that I'm very happy with currently and have had for about a year or a little less I think.

 

[HOOfan 1]

Are there any reliable SSDs out there?

 

[exdeath]

There are NO reliable storage devices.

 

[alaricljs]

Yup, if there's nothing important on the drive it'll last forever. Soon as you put something important on it you start building up potential until it finally smokes itself. If you keep up to date backups you reduce this potential.

Here's why I believe this:
1 Vertex 2 64GB used for my work, email, documents all sorts of stuff. I backed up whenever I thought of it and had not for a couple of months when I went on a business trip. Just before I packed the computer to travel home is the last time that drive worked. I had even reminded myself to do a backup during the trip and managed to not get around to it.

The other Vertex 2 64GB used as an OS drive in my home server, gentoo xen dom0, 2 gentoo domUs, 1 XP domU. media server, mail/web server, torrent client. The server stuff gets backed up nightly and has since I built the box. It's still running and I just recently added the RMA'd SSD from the above scenario as a mirror.

edit: the mail/web/db stuff is stored on that SSD too, hence the importance of the backups.

 

[Rvenger]

Intel non sandforce based drives are the most reliable.

 

[sm625]

My last backup was Feb 24th. Additionally I use a 1.5 TB drive for most files. But anything I work on at the moment is generally in the My Documents folder on the C drive, or on the desktop.

 

[HOOfan 1]

There are NO reliable storage devices.

There are no 100% reliable storage devices, but there are no 100% reliable ANYTHING.

However, I am sure there are plenty of storage devices with a much lower failure rate than the OCZ SSDs. I am asking if there are any SSDs out there with failure rates comparable to standard magnetic hard drives.

 

[alaricljs]

Well, for every new generation of SSDs you have to reset the clock and start fresh tracking reliability. Crucial m4's appear to be near the top along side Intel. Samsung appears to be more reliable than OCZ/SF as well. Intel drives have had teething issues just like any other drive, but if you go with an established model line you should be able to trust that they are among the most reliable.

 

[BrightCandle]

The reliability data looks OK for OCZ and other SSDs in general.

But the reliability figures are no where near what was expected of the technology when it was released. We were expecting the majority of drives to surive until they run out of writes (certainly more than 99%). But for whatever reason the other elements of these drives are failing before the flash does.

 

[Morg.]

Intel non sandforce based drives are the most reliable.

No.

Intel drives for first and second gen WERE more reliable than the alternatives, including sandforce.

However write amplification being lower w/ sandforce, they could be more reliable than Intel in particular conditions of intensive use.

Third gen there's not even enough data to make any conclusion and 4th gen is not even out.

The only sensible thing to do is to use an SSD only for stuff you don't care about losing, like your OS, or a system cache.

Anyway, with the cost of an SSD, adding a green drive is peanuts in comparison -

 

[blckgrffn]

Dropbox + Crashplan+ (buddy and I co-locate each others data, so free) AND freaking Skydrive, my important data better be safe...

On my WHS box that has RAID 1 drives.

Heck, I even did the taxes online so I didn't have to worry about that.

Privacy? What was that again?

Sorry to hear bout your issues, sm625. That is a huge PITA.

 

[Jman13]

I use Crashplan+ (to their servers)...works really well, and I know all my important data is backed up and off-site within a few hours of adding it to my computer. As I'm a photographer, my backup of 'important files' is pretty big, at 1.5TB.

I also have a few other off-site HD backups and an external HD that I backup to every few weeks. I also, once a year, burn BD-Rs of my best photos and store them at work.

 

[SphinxnihpS]

Victim... lol

 

[PowerYoga]

If you were using OCZ you should've been doing nightly backups. Normally you should be doing a weekly backup for your important office files anyways.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Blu-ray backup works for me.

 

[Zargon]

what FW?

 

[groberts101]

Disconnect power from the drive for several hours.. or even overnight for the drive to drain residual power.

Use the OCZ Linux utility to update to the latest firmware(or force flash it again if already running the current).. reset the boards cmos and boot from another OS volume to access any data you need to get off. Using another system can help detection issues at times as well.

If the drive does come back?.. be sure to SE and apply latest firmware(or force flash to the latest once again) ASAP or it may be RMA for sure. That will reset the drives base code and mapping back to fresh factory state and give you the same functionality as a drive that has no issues at all. Well.. aside from the next one I'll mention here.

DO NOT S3 or S4 sleep/hibernate that controller. The delay of issue often makes people who do run into issuse think that there is no correlation since panic locks can happen during use. Freeze.. BSOD.. gone on reboot. The more often you power transition these first gen SF drives?.. the greater the likelyhood that firmware or data corruption can result. I have 8 of these drives and they never skip a beat because I never S3/S4 them over the long term, aside from beta testing firmware for them.

And not to rub more salt here.. but even a smaller USB stick can be used for important data backups. Even though I don't have issues with firmware or data integrity.. I would never do my corporate books or taxes without saving the data somewhere other than my boot drive. Just good practice.

 

[bradley]

Telling someone to stop using hibernation/sleep with Sandforce is slightly like blaming the victim of a rape for dressing provocatively. haha

Perhaps all partners using these controllers should place warnings in their manuals. Though we all know such a restriction would means LESS sales. Instead, consumers find out the hard way and come here to vent.

I actually like OCZ for the sheer entertainment value they alone provide.