OWC mercury extreme ssd for envy 14

Just read the review here ... OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD Review (120GB) | StorageReview.com

Think i will pick this up over the OCZ vertex which seems to have a high failure rate per the newegg reviews it has.

Anyone have any experience with this?

 

why pay more for the same thing.

Do you how know much profit OCZ has made just on SSD? They are the number one seller of SSD's, they are doing so good selling them that they moving out of the memory business.

It is not a surprise that the company that sells the most has higher rate of failure. If you take the failure rate and take the ratio of what they sold to how many failed, it will still be probably less then any other company selling sand force based drives.

Sandforce is same under the hood, OCZ just markets them and they got in to the SSD field first and they have made a pretty solid customer base.

I have had the luck to use 3 vertex drives over the course of a few years and Vertex's are the best supported drives you will find. At this time I have an intel 160gb gen 2. Ocz is number one is taking care of their drives and firmware updates. Even though I dont own their ssd at this moment, I will buy their SSD in a heart beat, its just that I got the intel for 200 bucks and you cant beat that for that price.

 

Thanks, good input. Only other factor is that I have a mac pro (desktop) and the thinking is that i will use the ssd for the envy for about a year and then make it the boot drive for the mac and upgrade the one for the envy.

Did a lot of reading last night, found lots of issues with ssd and resume from sleep for mac and pc's likely stemming from sand force firmware. Intel seems to not have those issues but the drives are quite a bit slower.

Lastly, with refreshes expected from both Sandforce and Intel in Feb, may be worth waiting 15-20 days to buy the current gen at 20% lower prices?

 

What are you talking about??? That is the exact definition of a failure rate. The rate is not the total number of drives that failed. It is the proportion of the total sold that failed.

The argument that the original poster doesn't realize he/she is referring to is the SF-1200 vs Intel G2 debate. In summary, SF-1200 drives are faster but have a much higher failure rate. SF-1200 drives include both the vertex as well as the one you are considering purchasing. The potential benefit of the SF-1200 are the higher read/write speeds. Almost all SF-1200 drives are the same with the exception of the Vertex 2 which has a slightly better firmware available for it due to OCZ investing a lot of money into the development of the SF-1200 (OCZ is the only one with the rights to this improved firmware).

If you are a normal user, with the exception of boot times (about ~10 sec slower for intel), you will never notice a difference between the SF-1200 based drives and the intel G2 drives. All of these drives will open about any program instantly. Considering the durability of the intel drives (both short and long term) they are a better choice for most users. If you tend to copy large files often then the SF-1200 are probably a better option.

 

But is OCZ OSX friendly (OSX does not have TRIM support) like OWC is..
Plus OWC claims better long term performance vs degradation and lower power consumption (marginal).

 

That is what I said, the ratio of how many they sold to how many failed. like 1/100 or 100/10000. You said the same thing that I said. I dont know where I said something that was anything different then what you said.

 

They are the same drives under the hood with sand force 1222 controller. Every company will have claims that thier drive will last longer, may be it depends on what flash cells they are using. But most are using pretty much the same ones.

If you are using it on OSX, I suggest you wait for the drives coming out next, new micron contoller and next gen intels.

I was reading that the next gen controllers are suppose to implement garbage collection in a totally different way. It will in sense work better then trim as well. So no matter what os you are using, you dont have to worry about degration in performance.

 

Then why would it "not be a surprise that the company that sells the most has the highest failure rates"? That would be surprising and meaningful to me.

OP, as far as I know, there is no meaningful data suggesting that any one SF-1200 based SSD is any more reliable than the others. As far as OSX goes, I believe any of these drives will work; however, because TRIM is not supported in OSX yet you may have issues in the long run. Consult some mac forums for that info.

 

Honestly lets not take it any further. The logic is if you sell 1 bad per hundered, you should expect 2 per 200, and 10/1000. That is what I meant. It should not be a surprise to anyone. Dont expect to get the same amount of failure if you ramp up the production by 100 times.

Now to the OP. the sandforce drives have wear leveling that is why you see 120gb versions, they are actually 128gb with 8gb reserved for over provisioning. They dont have garbage collection but it is a different architecture. OCZ techs in their forums have explained it a lot of times, you should not expect this drive to slow down like the first gen ssd's used to. Even if you dont have trim, they should not degrade in performance over time like the first gen indilinix based vertex drives without trim.