OCZ Arc 100 (240GB)

[kingpotnoodle]

Because warranties are all about fine margins, and mainstream components are all about headline price. You can guarantee they will have done extensive modelling on failures rates, return rates and consumer write loads. Offering a warranty isn't as simple as saying "99.99% of our drives will stand 100TB of writes so we'll warrant to that amount". There are far greater economic considerations than that, and if they can cut 2% off the shelf price of a drive by having a slightly lower or shorter warranty, that may be worth it. A quick browse of Scan suggests that OCZ have managed to undercut the BX100 by around 8%....

Yes exactly, point made... they have cut costs to make the retail price cheaper and thus it would be uneconomical for them to warranty past 3 years and 22TBW at their selling price, as you say they have done modelling and that rather suggests to me that after the warranted usage failure rates may well shoot up. Hence I'd rather take that slightly more expensive option, I've got SSDs that have been going for 4-5 years now, so I do use them out that long.

[kalniel]

Yes exactly, point made... they have cut costs to make the retail price cheaper and thus it would be uneconomical for them to warranty past 3 years and 22TBW at their selling price, as you say they have done modelling and that rather suggests to me that after the warranted usage failure rates may well shoot up. Hence I'd rather take that slightly more expensive option, I've got SSDs that have been going for 4-5 years now, so I do use them out that long.

It probably isn't even any more failures than the more expensive drive, you're just paying less for a accept lower return rate.

I.E. if you have a return rate of 1% after 3 years and 2% after 4, you can offer the same product with different premiums to offset the return rates for the length of warranty - the 'premium' product basically comes with an 'extended warranty' that you paid for when you buy the product - it's not any less likely to fail, but you've already covered the cost of the replacements by charging more from the offset.

[shaithis]

Fitted one of these over the weekend.......must say I wasn't blown away but that may have been a symptom of the CPU more then anything else (E1-1200).

Took quite a while (~3 hours!) to install Windows 8.1 from USB (Corsair slider 3.0) in UEFI mode, install Office 2013 and do the first round of ~120 Windows updates.

[mapesdhs]

Ahh the OCZ hate continues, for no sensible rationale. What's so sad is that after the
budget models which caused so many problems way back, OCZ did make some excellent SSDs,
such as the Vertex4 and Vector. I've used lots of them. Plus, with the fw updated, the
entire Vertex2E/3 series are very good, I have more than 40 of them, no problems so far
(it's the old entry models like the Octane and Solid I would never use). Also, I suspect
some people had problems with older models because they were connected to non-Intel
SATA controllers; the only times I've ever seen any SSD act strange was when it's been
connected to a Marvell controller. Always use an Intel controller to do fw updates.
Atm I don't trust AMD's controllers after testing one board and observed awful SATA3
performance.

What's interesting is the way new budget models from other vendors continue to cause
problems for users these days (eg. MX100), but few seem to want to spew out the same
kind of bile that was once spouted for OCZ. Samsung has messed up aswell, eg. the EVO
performance drop, and Intel has made mistakes in the past too (eg. bricked 8MB issue),
yet people and review sites are a lot more forgiving (why? I've read plenty of
complaints about Samsung support recently, though I'd imagine Intel's support is good).

I picked up an Arc 240GB a while ago, speed-wise it was a lot better than I was
expecting compared to other brands/models. See my results archive for various models
tested with AS-SSD, CDM, HDTach and ATTO: http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/misc/ssdtests.zip


Btw Tarinder, why aren't you testing with AS-SSD aswell? And most of all, ATTO should
have far less prominence, it really isn't that meaningful as benchmarks go. AS-SSD is
the first thing I look at when a new model comes out. Of the tests you're using atm,
CDM is probably the most useful. It's a pity though you didn't have a wider range of
models for comparison, there are a few by Kingston and SanDisk which compete in this
price range.

Also, you ought to cover steady-state performance and idle/load power consumption
(especially idle usage, relevant for laptops, etc.)

And I think it would be good if you could try a sudden-power-loss test on the Arc,
do the same test with the other models, see what happens, eg. 30 times. Have the PC
running, then kill the power at the wall or just yank the plug out. Many will assume
by historical association that the Arc would barf, but IMO the other models are
equally likely to go fubar, probably more likely in the case of the MX100.

Ian.

PS. The Arc's endurance figure is more than acceptable for a standard client model.
I have old Vertex2E 240s with more thsn 25TB written and they're still running fine.

[mapesdhs]

PS. shaithis, use Autopatcher for all the initial updates. I have a ready-to-go
2GB AP folder, stored on a 240GB Vertex3 MAX IOPS, I use it for all Win installs.
Once done, the latest updates don't take so long.