Has anyone actually got OCZ SSD hard drive to work?

[YorkshirePadd26]

Checked this out just before I bought 2 30gb drive, glad I did

I think i'll leave it for a bit and see what else comes on the market.

 

[Dee-27]

2. Will a hardware controller card (with some decent cache) fix the problem? If so will it be at the expense of the speed of my 16x graphics card?

I don't think that many people will recommend that you buy a decent RAID card that is going to cost more then the drive cost itself.
If you are only going to use a single SSD drive then i would try and get it working on the motherboards controller, but if you do want to take the hardware RAID route with a single SSD. A PCIE x1 RAID card such as the HighPoint RocketRaid 3120 will work fine. It has 128MB of cache and since it is only a PCIE x1 card, you can fit it in a PCIE x1 slot and your graphics will remain at x16.

Looking to the future and perhaps adding another SSD, then a x4 or x8 RAID card will be needed. If you intend to get a x4 or x8 RAID card then you will have to do some research on your motherboard and find out how many PCIE lanes it has available. Your board has two x16 slots, the main will have 16 PCIE lanes and your graphics card will be fitted to that. The second slot is probably 8 PCIE lanes but could only have 4 PCIE lanes.

If your motherboard has 24 PCIE lanes then you can run x16 graphics and x8 RAID, if it has 22 lanes then adding a x4 card should still leave your graphics at x16, however, using a x8 RAID card will slow your graphics down to x8 as well. This is something you will need to find the answers for yourself by contacting the manufacturer of your motherboard.

To answer your question. Using SSD on hardware RAID with onboard cache has been very successful at solving the stuttering. But no one can guarantee it will work for you.

 

[1kiwi]

We offered him a refund based on his attitude to the help we offered, I did not say his attitude was bad, i said it was obvious to me what we were offering was not helping. I have to judge each case as they come along...George was furious about the product he had bought...we tried to offer some help which he clearly explained was not doing the trick for him so i moved to get him happy.

I can only help customers so far...if its not working why should i prolong the agony for the customer? i see no point.

I don't want to mess people around here..the UK is bad enough for customer service already..hence i moved to get George happy and put the funds in his hands to buy another drive.

I hope this clears up this situation...George was offered a refund based on his situation. I am still confident however that with some simple OS tweaks I could have had his SSD working fine...

I guess there are always two sides to the story and i personally think it's commendable that you have bothered to come on here and tell your side of the story. It sounds like this technology is a pretty safe bet when using a hardware raid card.

Dee: Would the performance be noticeably better with a 1X Raid card as opposed to a JMicron Controller?

 

[JBod]

Hi I am a bit out of date with the SSD scene. Do those "random write" problems that I think anandtech highlighted a while back go away with a good raid controller then?

 

[drunkenmaster]

I'm sorry but, its hardware, how many products are released that aren't really that useful. Physx for one, yet people buy it and don't particularly complain when they don't perform well.

Its still new tech, its FAR from standard, its far from established and I've not been remotely interested in buying one till they rival normal drives for price and performance, yet I knew the cheap drives aren't great. Whats so shocking about that, theres drives that are 3 times as much and theirs cheap drives, in what other sector do you expect the performance and support of something that costs much more on a budget model. Ok cpu's, but they are actually the same chips that are simply set to differently multipliers. You don't buy a x1800xt expecting it to perform as a 4870x2.

Neither do you buy a home use product at home use cost for work use and expect enterprise/business level support from a company that doesn't offer it.

Frankly if you want a drive where other people will test compatibility for you because yours is a work computer, you buy a business class model from a company that sells them.

Theres a reason that, a quadro FX card, identical in every way to a Nvidia desktop product except in the 5 times the price, its called support, the extra money is in the support. Also your CONDECENDING, CAPITALISING, STYLE, will be taken by 99.98% of people as rude and expecting help above and beyond when being rude, well I wouldn't. OCZ have been incredibly good before. I had the 600W psu that was louder than was expected due to the uk's voltage causing extra noise in the active PFC which wasn't there in the USA model. I just thought it was a little loud, i didn't complain, they told people, actively made people aware they could get a replacement, I asked, they sent one out(might have been Tony actually IIRC) and I got it incredibly quickly and a nice quieter PSU. Very few companies actively seek to help those who haven't asked for it yet, infact I can count the other companies on one hand(i'm also not a mutant with 17 fingers on a single hand ;P ).

Now in reality, they offered you a refund on a working product, it doesn't fail to boot, theres no indication that its faulty, its just not a great drive in your setup. Again almost no other companies will do this, OCUK probably wouldn't take it back as its used and theres no actual fault, yet OCZ still are offering a refund. ALmost any place that would let you return would charge you shipping and a restocking fee for such service so complaining about shipping seems a tad OTT aswell.


Now I also don't want to be to rude but, you are putting responsibility soley on OCZ's back here but, firstly its clear, as even MS have pointed out that their OS isn't perfect for SSD's, you're also using an older OS and the least supported least used OS in XP pro 64bit, which probably isn't the best idea.

Essentially, its sluggish because its a budget drive, which was fairly obvious and you're expecting it to work perfectly in every situation, and be incredibly fast, non of which you should have assumed before you got it frankly.

Theres a reason its not mainstream yet, theres a reason very very few people bother buying them and theres very little wrong with standard drives at this point in time.

Almost everyone on earth will get stung by something incompatible, a bad driver, an OS incompatibility with something they want to use. Blaming OCZ in this situation seems rather silly.



Here's a mad idea, accept the RMA, get a refund, buy 2 normal drives raided, or 3 in raid 5, have no issues, back up, and same speed for the same cost(at 30gb drives) or significantly cheaper at larger capacities.

Theres a reason business computers take 6 months to 3 years to upgrade after new kit comes out, they use tried and tested kit, and their IT departments will thoroughly test anything at high cost for months on end, if not years, before they deploy it in area's that will affect the work. I suggest you go with something everyone knows will work without trouble, and test a SSD drive as a backup, when you have it working perfectly with no issues, then move to them if you really need to.

 

[Dee-27]

Dee: Would the performance be noticeably better with a 1X Raid card?

Regarding sustained read and write speeds, there will be very little difference, in my experience.

Hi I am a bit out of date with the SSD scene. Do those "random write" problems that I think anandtech highlighted a while back go away with a good raid controller then?

It seems too, it hides the problem of random writes because, instead of the IDE bus becoming saturated, which grinds the system to a halt, the cache que's the data instead and keeps the IDE bus clear. But even with more than 128MB of cache, it will become full at some point. So, you also have to do at least some of tweaks mentioned and discussed on OCZ's support forum and allow the RAID cards cache to flush when the drive is not busy doing anything else.

1, Turn off drive indexing (it's useless for SSD anyway, as access times are so small on SSD.
2, Turn off search indexing (for the same reason as above).
3, Switch off the page file. (it should never be on by default anyway).
4, Switch off prefetch (not required for SSD)
5 Switch off Superfetch in Vista (same reason as above)

Having said all that above. If you have a single SSD and are having a few problems with stuttering, 'steadystate' can most likely do as well as a PCIE x1 hardware RAID card if you are running a 32bit OS.

 

[gsport george]

OK I give up I will dump the SSD and copy it to a normal HD when I get home, I would still appreciate knowing if this will work but whatever...

Thanks for the informatio on PCIE cards, my MB is just 16lanes as far as I can make out. And if it isnt an assured solution then spending the time and money to try it doesnt seem sensible at this point.

However to suggest that I should expect problems because this is new kit is just ridiculous. My wife has had an EEEPC with a 4gb SSD for well over a year with no problems, the discs are sold as being a standard har drive with no caveat that they do not work out of the box without substantial teaking of the OS and will vary widely from hardware setup to hardware setup, AND I specificaly phoned to try to check before purchase.

I have built my own work machines for the last 12 years and have NEVER had an issue like this, yes I should not expect product support on the same level but seeing as I am here posting for help on the OCZ and this forum it is pretty obvious that I wasnt expecting it.

So ijn summary, the drive does not work out of the box with most Wimdows OSs.... and in my opinion that information should be provided up front...

I hope that OCZ and Overclockers will consider it...

 

[ocztony]

George..go over to the Asus forum, there are tons of posts about tweaking XP to stop it stuttering on the EEPC. D111 (one of my mods) came over from there to the OCZ forum looking for tweaks.

Raid cards...the 3 series Rocketraid cards are good, even the 1X card is not to bad although you lose around 20% speed in raid 0 it however gets round the stutter as it has 128mb cache.

George...if i lived by you i would personally tweak your system, I know i could get it working quite well. It may not break records in the the synthetic benchmarks but it would boot fast, load apps fast etc and be very usable.

I had a PM of an Italian end users just today where he explained pre tweaked vista64 was not to good but post tweaked vista was quite stunning.

If that's not your thing though Ryders offer is still there...

 

[drunkenmaster]

OK I give up I will dump the SSD and copy it to a normal HD when I get home, I would still appreciate knowing if this will work but whatever...

However to suggest that I should expect problems because this is new kit is just ridiculous. My wife has had an EEEPC with a 4gb SSD for well over a year with no problems, the discs are sold as being a standard har drive with no caveat that they do not work out of the box without substantial teaking of the OS and will vary widely from hardware setup to hardware setup, AND I specificaly phoned to try to check before purchase.

I have built my own work machines for the last 12 years and have NEVER had an issue like this, yes I should not expect product support on the same level but seeing as I am here posting for help on the OCZ and this forum it is pretty obvious that I wasnt expecting it.

So ijn summary, the drive does not work out of the box with most Wimdows OSs.... and in my opinion that information should be provided up front...

I hope that OCZ and Overclockers will consider it...

to be honest i've never done a straight copy of one drive to another,i think you need to use something like a image program, ghost backup or something along those lines. But honestly, after doing tweaks and things I'd simply install on the new drive, don't connect the other drive as its just easier that way, then copy over what files you need afterwards.

But there are some things to , well point out about your post. You most certainly did want support of a professional level, as you specifically pointed out its a work machine and that OCZ should test things on their own system so you don't have to risk your own. That is exactly the kind of thing you ask for, when you've paid 4 times as much and have proper support.

its also worth saying that the EEEPC isn't a performance behemoth, far from it, and expecting a 4GB turd performance essentially stick flash drive on a internet browsing capable PC to work ok with essentially no transfer activity at all, and expecting that to somehow translate to uber desktop performance of the benchmark pretty big numbers kind or completely normal performance is not really, well , logical.

But its fairly obvious other people had the problem, and other people have fixed it to some degree. But also remember the EEEPC goes through specific testing in the setup it has and has drivers specifically done for that setup. Its like an app working perfectly on a Xbox 360 and having teething issues when the same app is release to so many varied PC's, one doesn't equate to the other in any way.

Also, to say it doesn't work on any OS< when you've tested on just about the most obscure OS there is, is IMHO jumping to conclusions somewhat. xp pro 64 gets very little support and testing as, frankly so few people use it. Driver support for Vista 64 is really the only time you could somewhat hope for realistic driver support, XP pro 64 came and went with little fuss and almost no support until more recently.

Its also worth mentioning, the drive does work does it not? you installed windows, you can use it, its not corrupting or crashing your computer. It stalls with poor performance, thats not the same thing as not working.

Yes, the product probably isn't as smooth as it should be, but thats new types of products for you, all SSD's until recently were fairly, well, crap if we're honest. They're getting better but they are still fairly unnecessary. Ok saving power is good, but a HDD isn't using a fraction of your CPU/GPU/MEM anyway, speed isn't massively better and price/performance is worse. You could raid 0 6x 250gb drives for the price you can buy a single SSD 250gb for and seriously perform.

I think theres a little, went into it blindly expecting absurd performance due to the price and the idea of the tech, instant access, and partly a little the drive is even worse than maybe it should be and that all adds up to severly dissappointed, which everyone can understand.

But your post on OCZ forum, and here both instantly jumped out as hostile and you've got to expect people to react to that, thats life.If they didn't offer a refund and simply deleted every post and pretended you don't exist, as many other companies do, fine, but thats not what happened here. It might not be what you want exactly but the offer you got was superb compared to most companies.


Personally, stick with normal drives for another few years, maybe even the next OS aswell. The drives can only get better and exponentially cheaper as production numbers increase.

 

[Aurhinius]

well I am glad this has come to a fairly reasonable resolution

SSD's are at the cutting edge and OCZ put themselves at the cutting edge as do we as a community. Not surprising that we find ourselves having to go above and beyond to get some of these things working well. How much time do some people spend tweaking a motherboard for an overclock?

It's okay to do it for a motherboard but not your OS? If there is one thing vista needs straight out of the box it is tweaking!

 

[Participant]

We are working on solutions for 64bit OS's, at this time we have a good solution for 32bit OS's and a ton of tweaks that actually do work if you spend time applying them.

And there's the crux of it and the most important aspect of this thread. I'm readong past all the guff and the shouting and ranting; I would never buy a drive that required tweaking to get working.

I'm sure OCZ are an excellent company with superb service etc.etc. but irrespective, I personally will forget these drives entirely until their reliability and usability is on a par with HDDs. Thanks for making my mind up.

 

[^JP^]

ocztony,
Can you look at this and tell me if its ok?


While the HDTach from my other post looks good. This ATTO seems a bit all over the place.



Again its the V1 drives on the Intel ICH10R.

 

[1kiwi]

300 mb average read! Are they V1 or V2 drives?

 

[^JP^]

They are V1, see under 2nd screenshot

 

[ocztony]

Nothing wrong with the performance there, now stop worrying about the speed and enjoy using the drives...

 

[danielanthony]

Well I for one am impressed with OCZ's customer service and am happy to have their RAM installed in my PC

Anyone who says that they think its unreasonable to have to tweak their OS to get a new bit of hardware working obviously doesnt know much about PC's. Building your own PC is all about bringing diverse hardware and software together and making it work. Do you seriously think Dell and Co just bung a few components together to make a PC and hope it works? No, they test their systems for months before selling them to end users because you can never tell how one bit of hardware/software will work with another bit of hardware software. This is why there is why there are TEST departments in IT companies etc and its the nature of the IT industry.

Just my 2 pence worth and I hope ocztony doesn't get too disheartened by the moaners on here because 99.9% of us think OCZ is doing a good job.

 

[danielanthony]

Oh and George, you will have to use Acronis or another utility to clone your boot drive onto another, remove the original boot drive, then use windows recovery to make the new drive bootable. I think Acronis might even have a utility for doing all this built in anyway...

 

[1kiwi]

Anyone who says that they think its unreasonable to have to tweak their OS to get a new bit of hardware working obviously doesnt know much about PC's.

I think that's utter crap TBH. I have built several PC's and from time to time i have had to RMA a new part. Installing drivers aside, i have never had to make fundamental changes to the operating system to get a part working that should essentially be plug & play. IMO, it either performs as advertised / very close to, or not.

Getting a part to perform above an expected level on the other hand is a completely different story.

NB: This is in no way related to OCZ, it's just my opinion as a consumer.

 

[ocztony]

Please remember windows XP and Vista were never written to actually work well with SSD drives...M$ know this and released a PDF concerning the issues.

http://download.microsoft.com/downl...14-54368ec482da/WNS-T432_SolidStateDrives.pdf

Its worthy of a read and does explain why M$ are looking to inject new code into W7.

 

[gsport george]

^^^^ I just dont understand why I couldnt have this information up front before purchasing the drive.

I dont need the headache and I imagine that OCZ and overclockers dont need it either. Once I posted on the OCZ forum there was no reluctance to admit the incompatibility so why not be up-front about it?