back to article OCZ wheels out lower octane SSD for Sunday drives

OCZ has a new SSD product and brand, Petrol, which uses cheaper asynchronous NAND than last month's Octane with its synchronous NAND. Both Petrol and Octane are 2.5in form-factor SSDs with a 6Gbit/s SATA interface, and use OCZ's own Indilinx Everest controller. Octane flash is 25nm IMTF 2-bit synchronous NAND, whereas Petrol …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oh Dear

    What a ridiculous name.

    1. defiler

      Ridiculous Name?

      Just like iPod, and you can see how that bombed in the market...

      1. Bob H
        Trollface

        Too right!

        Next a company will use a name like "Diesel" to sell perfume! The fools.

      2. defiler

        Wow - 3 thumbs down?

        I'm guessing my point was completely missed. Stop and think about product names. And how many of them are actually pretty stupid. iPod was the first that sprung to my mind. Hoover would be an equally good one. Pepsi. Whopper. Walkman. None of them are exactly inspiring names, but because they've become household brands we accept them.

        Never judge a product on its name. Unless it's "Crapmobile" of course.

  2. DJO Silver badge
    Meh

    Call me Mr Sceptical

    MTBF of 1,250,000 hours?

    That's over 140 years but the guarantee is only for 3 years?

    As this technology has only existed for a few years it cannot have been tested for that long. They might be being disingenuous, perhaps it means per memory cell so if you have 256 billion cells and 50% will have failed in 140 years(!) then statistically you could expect to have a cell fail after about 3 days which is also not what I think they mean.

    What it probably means is "this stuff will probably last until the next generation replaces it so any suitably big number will do for the MTBF"

    1. Steven Jones

      Misunderstanding MTBF

      @DJO

      You demonstrate a common misunderstanding of MTBF with the operational lifetime of a device. The MTBF of a device is simply the average number of operational hours between failures. So if your company has 1,000 of these SSDs, you would expect one failure every 1,250 hours (or roughly one ever 52 days). However, the working lifetime of the SSD might only be 10 years. What this means is that after 10 years roughly 70 of these SSDs would have failed, but it might be that by that they've reached the end of their operational lifetime and they start failing at a much higher rate.

      In fact, MTBF tells you nothing directly about the operational lifetime of a device. That has to be expressed separately, and it might be constrained by something other than the passage of time - in the case of SSDs, that measure might be the number of write cycles, whilst with HDDs powered-up time might be the relevant figure. With a car engine, it might be total mileage.

      Of course it's right to be sceptical about MTBFs as these are not independently reported (and at the beginning of the devices life, they are extrapolated.

    2. Danny 14
      Stop

      well

      3 years is bloody good (seeing as my vertex 2 has been back to them twice in a year - panic mode once and completely dead the next)

    3. Lee Dowling Silver badge

      How would that be different to any other hard drive or storage device?

      If it lasts longer than the computer it's in, I consider that a success. If not, it's a failure. The chances of using even 5+ year old hardware are slim, let alone 10+ or more. Ten years ago XP didn't exist - now it's obsolete. I don't honestly expect my hard drive to last that sort of time, even though every one I've owned (with the exception of a 40Mb model decades ago) has lasted that long or longer.

      Similarly, I do have computers that are 10+ years old running but I honestly don't expect their graphics cards, or monitors, or RAM, or CD Drive, or any of their components to not burn out at any moment. I won't replace them until they do but I don't expect it.

      A drive that given 100,000 hours is more than adequate enough for any business or personal use so long as you're using your brain and backing up anyway, and almost all the drives I've ever bought that stated a MTBF in that range lasted at least that long. This has no moving parts and pretty predictable statistical decay of its components, so I can quite believe the MTBF to be accurate. With SSD's, I've often seen even 2m hrs quoted. Why not? I've seen EEPROM's last longer than that and still be perfectly functional. With SSD's you have all sorts of checksums and parity and spare sectors and everything else to cope with normal use.

      My next purchase will be a nice SSD but I'll be more worried about controller failures and firmware upgrades of the damn thing than I ever will about it actually dying on me. And I'll *STILL* take every measure necessary to make sure I don't lose a byte even if they came with £10m of data guarantees.

    4. Ammaross Danan
      Coat

      That is all

      http://lmgtfy.com/?q=MTBF+testing

  3. Avatar of They
    Thumb Up

    Look quite good

    Pricing for that mail & web surf second Pc you don't really need to hammer with blue ray, media streaming and HD games.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      For most users I'd imagine

      They wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the SSDs.

      The price is definitely moving in the right direction. Only question for me is OCZ's reliability (i.e. blue screens and bricks) - especially with the new controllers.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    RMA

    i would never by anything from OZ again as their RMA process goes like this

    1) request RMA

    2) get auto-generated confirmation of request noting that you will get a response from the customer service team within "x" days

    3) wait "x" days

    4) wait some more

    5) after 3*"x" days go onto ocz forums and join the vast hordes whining about the RMA process

    6) have a mod on the forum email someone in customer service at which point your RMA gets processed

    7) receive RMA number etc

    8) send in dead kit

    9) wait another long (2 weeks in my case) period of time

    10) go back onto forums and necro your old thread

    11) different mod gets in contact with customer service on your behalf

    12) receive replacement kit several days later

    waste of time and so amazingly frustrating so *no matter how good* OCZ stuff is i will never spend money on their products again.

    OCZ are the first company in >20 years of buiding my own PCs that has achieved this lifetime ban.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Had a 128GB Crucial C300 die on me a few months back. Phoned up Crucial support, got an RMA on the phone, posted it in to them, and received a brand spanking new M4 two days later - sent Special Delivery no less. Sorta unhappy my C300 died, but can't fault their RMA process.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Until SSDs become reliable, OCZ can keep them

    OCZ seems to not know what direction to go in with SSDs so they keep cranking out a different model almost weekly. Until they fix the compatibility and reliability issues, they can keep theses SSDs.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Wait and see is the watch word

    Anandtech sumed it up well when they stated that consumer grade SSDs are "immature tech" and that consumers should wait for 6-12 months to see how many Bugs still need to be resolved before buying a specific SSD model.

    OCZ in particular has had Bug issues but they are not alone as Crucial, Intel, Corsair, Samsung and other brands have also. The new Plextor M3S looks interesting and competitively priced but only time will tell how many Bugs exist in all of these new SSDs.

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