My SSD transformed into HDD over night!

[T.M.]

Today my "OCZ Vertex SSD" drive turned into a "yatapdong barefoot-rom", in just one night!

Seems like others have had this problem too!

I noticed weird stuff before this happened: all of sudden my computer could just shut off and it would show me: "select proper boot device" or something, this happened maybe 3 times. I thought some program was crashing my windows, until today i started up the computer, went afk for 10mins, came back and saw the same screen. This time reboot / shutdown didnt help, nothing helped. So i took my old crappy HDD to have Windows installed on it (on a 10gig partition, sigh), once again. Hurray.

Luckily i was prepared for the worst, so i didnt keep any important files on that harddrive. (i hope so).

Third time this year i re-installed Windows! This must be some kind of a record, at least for me.

Well, i paid 250€ or something for this piece of shit. I am not going to buy an SSD again... Ever.

Wonder if the warranty is still on? I have returned so many Harddrives that i think they have me on their blacklist or something by now Edit: oh wait, this was from another shop, and i cant even find the warranty information anywhere... i guess its warranted for-ever?

[elypter]

i have an usb stick from ocz with life time warranty. im going to use it for the 3rd time soon. just ask in their forum.

[Pyro]

Yaptadong? Sounds kinda rude to me! Even worse, it's a company (is it?) I've never heard of...

Even though I don't own an SSD myself (still too pricey imo) I've never heard of something like that happening. I think I'll stick to classic HDD's for a little longer! Either way, good luck getting it sorted.

[T.M.]

i have an usb stick from ocz with life time warranty. im going to use it for the 3rd time soon. just ask in their forum.

Your USB stick turned into HDD too? 3 times!?

If i ever return this piece of shit, i will probably sell it to someone, but even sellling it is pretty much waste of time, might get maybe 20€ for it, if even that much.

[elypter]

it turned into some kind of debug device once. i guess thats what happens if the controller encounters a problem with the memory unit.
i for one didnt have a problem with my ssd yet but i dont use it much anyway. (i will if i finally reinstall the system)

[T.M.]

Is your SSD OCZ too? Then you better not use it much

Were you able to recover your data from the USB sticks when they went crazy?

[elypter]

no, its a samsung 128gb for ~ 150€ a year ago.

first time it was my fault. i broke it by sitting on my laptop while it was attatched. i was able to get the data by bending it. second time there were signs ahead. slow copy and missing files. this time nothing important was on it.

[Cuban-Pete]

From what I read on the internet the early OCZ (Vertex) series had serious bugs in the (older) firmware. So it might have been smart to upgrade. Also the known cases of SSD failure are higher for OCZ (vertex) than the other brands, probably because of a bad firmware and nobody upgrades. I got for a year now a Crucial SSD and it has been working perfect since the beginning. I think you should not give up on SSD's they make the PC so damn fast. You could look into Intel (least failure rate, but higher price) or Samsung/Crucial.

[T.M.]

I think you should not give up on SSD's they make the PC so damn fast.

Explain. Please.

Overall it just makes my computer lag more... If you are writing to the SSD with one program, it will take up all the bandwidth and any other program which needs to write there, will have to wait. The write speed for my SSD was around 4MB/s which is the same as my internet connection speed! Pathetic. It may be faster at the beginning, but it goes down to 4MB/s very fast.

I cant think of a situation where all you see is the positive impacts. Maybe for some game folder, games which write almost nothing on the SSD. Though, the installation of a game would be 20 times slower....

It may load Windows faster, but then it also makes it damn slow, since for some programs you cant even decide where they will write their data... and sometimes when windows writes something, you will experience total freeze on your system.

I would need at least 20 SSD's to get the same write speed which i enjoy with my HDD's already. (80MB/s? probably more).

[Cuban-Pete]

Strange... was/is your SSD perhaps full? It needs free space to work properly. Although not everyone agrees about this, some say 20%. I use a 64GB SSD for windows and one game, the rest is on a Samsung 1TB. The only time I experience lag is when my HDD turned to sleep and needs to start again. For me there are only benefits to a SSD. Windows starts extremely fast, basic programs that are on the SSD start faster. Copying to the drive is like 80MB/s and I can easily copy two files at the same time. However I don't write much to the SSD.

Sounds to me you just have a crappy experience because of a crappy SSD (brand).

You should try a benchmark tool and compare with what others get in speed.

[T.M.]

I had 50% free space.

"Copying to the drive is like 80MB/s"
WTF!? impossible. how much empty space do you have? maybe thats why its so fast now: 90% free space?

What SSD do you got? Give link so i can buy it.

[elypter]

i have this one:

520 MB/s / 320 MB/s
its 99€. i wonder how you were able to pay 250€ for that piece of crap with 4 MB/s. even my earlier mentioned usb stick had a write speed thats 6 times as high

[Cuban-Pete]

I have a Crucial M4, but I hear Samsung is also decent.

[Cuban-Pete]

i have this one:

520 MB/s / 320 MB/s
its 99€. i wonder how you were able to pay 250€ for that piece of crap with 4 MB/s. even my earlier mentioned usb stick had a write speed thats 6 times as high

Prices have dropped a lot. I paid 90 euro for 64GB, now you can get a 128GB for that money.

[T.M.]

I have a Crucial M4, but I hear Samsung is also decent.

Is that Crucial some new brand? Never heard of it and couldnt find it from many finnish stores either. not even in the biggest store in finland.

Samsung is good by my experience. I only buy samsung HDD's these days, they are very cool (in means of temperature), and also very silent.

i have this one:

520 MB/s / 320 MB/s

Those benchmarks are always lies what you read from the web. You have to make your own tests and see the reality. My SSD was told to be like gigamega fast, but it was ultrasuper slow. Maybe the first 500megabyte file was written as fast as 320MB/s, but after that it dropped to 4MB/s.

[Cuban-Pete]

ssd-11-10-2011.png (55.19 KiB) Viewed 31108 times

ssd-28-8-2012.png (48.08 KiB) Viewed 31108 times

Running the SSD for almost one year. It did drop a lot with 4K stuff, but strangely risen with 512K and Seq. Maybe because of firmware update.

[elypter]

crystalmark.png (45.33 KiB) Viewed 31103 times

[T.M.]

Running the SSD for almost one year. It did drop a lot with 4K stuff, but strangely risen with 512K and Seq. Maybe because of firmware update.

Looks like your update actually made it slower. i would revert back to old firmware if i was you... or maybe its slower because you have less free space? doesnt make sense though, the space difference isnt that big.

Edit: i made tests with my god-knows-how-old HDD (which i use now for the windows since my SSD blew up):

hdd250gb_maxtor.png (30.76 KiB) Viewed 31099 times

Some reason i cant believe its very accurate... except the first 2 speeds.

I cant stop wondering, how does it even do those random tests if i have only 5% space free? i think it should give better results for random tests then...

[Cuban-Pete]

HDD's are crap at 4K simply because it needs to move the head a lot and that takes time.

I see that the new SamSung SSD's are even faster than my oldy.