Customer Reviews

OCZ  Vertex 2 240GB SATA 3Gb/s OCZSSD2-2VTXE240G 2.5" Solid State Drive  (SSD)with up to  285MB/s read and  50K IOPS write

5 star:		(122)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(33)
1 star:		(92)

 

 

I purchased 21 of these through two vendors. Two of these have failed in less than 3 months. Yes, that would be a 10% failure rate so far. When I tried to warranty the item, they ignored all of the information I put in the initial trouble ticket, delayed the RMA by requiring redundant, useless info and arguing as to whether it was purchased at an authorized retailer despite the fact that both resellers are listed on THEIR site. Each email was followed by 24-36 hours of silence from them. Bottom line, my experience in the first 3 months is 10% failure rate, and 2-3 weeks delay in warranty service. Sure, stuff happens and electronics break, but their support and delays are frustrating and unnecessary. Beware!!!!

I purchased this drive due to the specs on speed and an overall feeling that OCZ is quality based on memory purchases, but this experience has soured my views on OCZ. I have had this drive RMA two times now, the first issue I had was the drive would not past POST on my Gigabyte EP45 motherboard with AHCI enabled, yet my Kingston SSD would POST just fine. I followed techs suggestion to upgrade to the latest firmware etc. it didn't fix the problem. After weeks of haggling back and forth, I RMA through Amazon (Thank goodness) the replacement drive had the same model number, yet the plate on the bottom was a different make and it had a much newer firmware than what was on the OCZ web site. Low and behold, this drive would POST with AHCI enabled, so I installed my OS and had been using the drive for about a month. It was 11PM, tired, so I put my system into suspend like I normally do, then work up at 4AM and took the machine out of suspend, then Win7 went to blue screen (oh no, that's not good), so I powered off, back on to boot, NOTHING! the drive was no longer recognized (dead). I tried the drive on two other systems, in an external USB case, nothing, it's gone. Great, so I have been going back and forth again with OCZ tech, they are treating me like I did something wrong, I don't know what I am doing etc. Based on the poor quality and horrible support, I will never buy another OCZ SSD again.

Also, google OCZ vertex 2 and drives dying, this seems to be happening a lot. I'm just saying, do some research before you place your data at risk, oh yeah, backup your data daily!

I bought this SSD on August 21st, 2010 and it completely failed by Sept 30th, taking all my data with it. Do not buy this item. It was wickedly fast when it ran, and silent --- but the reliability it too bad to warrant purchase. (I was using Windows XP, and this was the primary drive.)

Dec 18th, 2010

OCZ replaced the drive. It runs, after a fashion. It is the primary drive for a Windows 7 Basic netbook. When the drive is working, the netbook is fast, but it locks up every couple of hours or less and stays locked up until I hard-recycle the power. I eventually removed the drive an put the conventional drive back into the computer. Not as fast, but significantly more reliable.

March 4th, 2011

I prepared the drive using the setup disks and it has now run flawlessly for 3 months. Originally, I imaged my existing drive and copied that image to my new SSD. I believe that the process of pressing the image onto the SSD is what killed the first drive. Windows 7 reports that my machine is 20% faster with the SSD than with my 120GB 7200RPM 8MB Cache, normal SATA drive. So the total system performance is significantly improved.

When I first got this product I was very impressed. Crazy fast boot time and applications are noticeably snappier. But after a week of use, I wanted to keep open a couple apps so I figured good old hibernate could help me. When I powered on my laptop (HP 8540w) the SSD was toast. The BIOS would not even recognize the drive. I search the OCZ forums, and found MANY reports of problems with their drives when attempting to hibernate and/or sleep. I am shocked that a technology that debuted in Windows 95 (16 years ago!) is not properly handled by an SSD. After contacting OCZ support (which took 3 days to get back to me) I was told I needed to RMA. But the cost of shipping the drive to OCZ was on me and they would not ship me a replacement until some undetermined period of time after they received the failed drive. On the bright side, Amazon's return policy was far nicer. Gave me a read-to-print package slip and all costs related to shipping were covered by Amazon. In summary, this is the last OCZ product I will ever buy, but thanks to their excellent customer service, I will continue to buy products from Amazon.

This drive has been rated by a PC enthusiast magazine as the best of the best. I installed the OCZ Vertex 2----120 GB series solid state drive and windows 7 immediately loaded and installed. As noted with these SSD devices. It was crazy fast in every thing it did--- Install programs, launch programs, boot up and shut down. Amazon promptly shipped on 9/15/2010 and on 1/20/2011 I got the message--- drive not found please specify drive or insert boot-able media or drivers. This happened while on line. One minute it was fine the next gone. On alternate boot ups is would appear in the BIOS and on the next it was gone. When I finally quit trying to repair it and tried a clean install--- the installation disc could not find it. I do not think three months and two weeks is a satisfactory service life of any thing no matter how well it works. I should have listened to all those who had DOA or early failures. I now have the 128 GB Crucial C300 series SSD installed and it is running fine. I sure hope this one being made by a major memory company will last better.

1-31-11 OCZ does offer a three year warranty on their SSD drives. It took just under three weeks to get a new drive. You need to go to their site and search under customer service and select RMA and send an e-mail describing the problem. A day or two later they up grade your status from received to in process. You then need to furnish info about your computer--mother board, memory and memory settings, voltage ranges, ETC. It seems that they want to insure that you did not burn it up in the process of over clocking.I did not over clock my computer at all. It was plenty fast with this drive. Once you e-mail that back in a couple of days they approved mine for RMA. You then need to wrap it in bubble wrap, put in a copy of their authorizing e-mail and a copy of the invoice. This invoice is easily obtained from your purchase history if you bought from Amazon. If you do not put the RMA number on the outside of the box they throw it away and you are out of luck. I wrote RMA and the number on each side of the box. You ship it to California and they ship a new one. At each stage there is a time limit that you must respond before or the RMA process is terminated. They are responsive in replying and up grading the process each step of the way.

The one thing that I have done that I find helpful is to create a three ring binder for each computer. I get plastic sheets that fit the binder and have a pocket to hold sheets of paper. I put the mother board manual in one page, the info for each item installed in the computer typed up on a sheet, any info that came with the various components, and the invoice receipts for each item. This is easily acquired at Amazon. If I find binder sheets that hold DVD discs it will also put the driver discs in the binder.

Ok, I just purchased an Asus G73JW-A1 series laptop. The Windows Experience Index for the 500GB 7200RPM drive was at 5.9. Just swapping one of the 2 - 500GB drives included in the laptop with one of these made a huge difference. I swapped out the actual OS drive with this one and did a fresh install of Windows 7 Ultimate. I did follow some of the recommendations to make your Windows 7 faster and to more effectively use SSD's. The Windows Experience Index for the HDD Data transfer is at 7.8 out of a max of 7.9. That alone justifies the higher price for this unit but not only did that number jump up but as you will immediately notice after installing this drive that your computer boots up very quickly. Mine takes 17 seconds from pressing the power button to having a fully usable desktop <--- that is without having to put in a password. With the password screen, I would say around 22 seconds to have a fully usable desktop.

I do not know what some of the negative reviews are about as my drive has not given me any problems. I will of course update if it does give me any problems in the future. My recommendations are to have this as an OS drive and then have a 7200RPM drive for storage if your Laptop supports it. Of course your desktop would support this nicely and it does come with an Adapter to fit this 2.5" drive to a 3.5" bay. Again, highly recommended and OCZ has yet to fail me. This is my 5th OCZ purchase, started out with their RAM's and am now using their SSD's. If the longevity of their RAM is an indication of the quality OCZ puts into their products then this SSD will last me a long long time I am sure.

Notes for people who have never used an SSD before...Do some research and only buy what you need. By that I mean, if you are only going to be using this for surfing the web and checking email, please buy a version that is made for things like that. Not only will you save a ton of money but it won't be that noticeable of a difference between the SSD's for usage of that kind. The OCZ Agility is a bit cheaper than the Vertex 2 and will give you the same performance for web browsing etc. If you are a power user and play games, video editing etc...then by all means purchase the Vertex 2.

Also some people say that this does not work with the G73JW or the G73JH Series of Laptops...I have no idea what they are talking about but they need to learn how to use these drives. If you can't get it to work with your computer you shouldn't be investing in one of these or ask a friend who knows what they are doing to configure it for you. If you install this in an XP system make sure to Google what you need to do to make sure you don't have defrag on etc. Hopefully this review will help people make a better decision on whether to buy this drive or not.

OCZ changed from a 34mn to a 25nm yet didn't tell anyone. The drives are slower and have only 115GB of space w/ windows seeing even less. OCZ is offering people a upgrade to the 34mn memory drives for a price.

Bad Marketing OCZ.

I just bought this drive new from amazon and noticed slightly lower benchmarks than those advertised (max sustained write speed 217MB/s, max read speed 240 MB/s, with ATTO benchmark). After doing some research I believe there are actually three "generations" of this same drive, and I received a third gen drive.

The first gen. was screaming fast, using 32nm chips, the second gen. used larger size 25nm chips, and ran very slowly and had less available storage. The third gen. is medium fast, using smaller 25nm size chips, but more of them.

The second gen. drives are actually liable for an RMA from OCZ because they didn't have as much disk space as advertised.

The third gen. is what I believe is currently being sold now. Unfortunately it is about 20% slower than the first gen. in most crystaldiskmark benchmarks, and 50% slower in at least one (the 4K QD32 test--i.e. it doesn't handle noncompressed data as well).

That being said, it's still reasonably speedy (hard drive is almost never the speed bottleneck anymore [!]), but false advertising from OCZ will never win my heart, so 2 stars.

My numbers for ATTO are a bit lower than the specs, too (and that's what they're supposed to use to produce their advertised benchmarks), so it's a wonder that OCZ hasn't revised the specs. Poor showing I'd say.

Holy Moly! This thing is fast. My disk speed in Windows 7 experience went from 5.9 to 7.4!!! I'm giddy with excitement at how much faster my computer feels now. Previously, I had a Corsair SSD which I was pretty happy with. But I'm blown away with this drive. My only disappointment is that the actual formatted size is closer to 110GB. My previous drive was 128GB (120GB formatted).

Used Acronis Trueimage Home Acronis True Image Home 2010 to copy the disk from my old disk to new (process took less than 1hr). Have a eSATA adapter Thermaltake BlacX eSATA USB Docking Station which I placed the new drive in to copy the data from my old drive. Then I just swapped them (sold my old drive for $100). You might consider just using your old drive as a backup using the same setup.

This drive is perfect for the road warrior who wants performance PLUS better battery life. I'm an IT tech for a living (have been in technology for 20+ years) so I'm not easily impressed by technology. Yet, I would highly recommend this drive. After research, I decided this was the fastest drive on the market in this price range and it exceeded my expectations.

In case you don't know, be sure to use this type of drive with Windows 7 -- you can use it with XP but you won't realize it's full potential.

I installed this device as a secondary drive into my HP laptop running Windows 7 Enterprise 32bit. It worked fine for about a week, but today I started the laptop and the drive letter was simply not there. The device is visible in Device Manager, but Disk Management shows it as unformatted space. All my attempts to recover any data from the device were unsuccessful.

I went to OCZ support forums and I see that multiple people are having this issue, especially with these newer drives based on 64Gbit NAND.

BUYERS BEWARE, make sure you check the status of this issue before you purchase!