Toshiba owned OCZ Vertex 460 SSD

OCZ has been bought out by Toshiba. Toshiba is honoring warranty on Vertex products for their normal amount but other less products (like the Apex) only have warranty for less than a year now. OCZ has the highest failure rate of any SSD manufacturer so I stay away. Most people will probably come in here now and say how their OCZ has been running great and no issues, and that is fine but it still doesnt change the fact that they are the highest failure rate drives. I myself have owned a few OCZ drives. Some OCZ Summit series (Samsung parts) that were quite reliable (only 1 failure many years into use), but I take that as more of Samsung's part than OCZ since it uses a Samsung chipset.
Indilinx chipsets had somewhat high failures, but they put OCZ on the map because Indilinx Barefoot was the first good performing SSD controller ever to come to market. No one cared about the higher failure rates on Indilinx because other chipsets at the time also had high failure rates, and the speed was a huge improvement over the crap jmicron chipsets we had before. Then OCZ moved to Sandforce and they had a really fast chipset too, but failure rates were incredibly high and it had lots of bugs.
Out of my two actual OCZ vertex drives that I owned, both have failed. If you asked me 2 months ago I would have said only 1 out of 2 had failed, but I just had the 2nd die so now it is 100% failure rate of my OCZ drives. I always say stick to Samsung or Intel, though Samsung is more reliable. I have used like 10 or 11 Samsung SSDs now, and not 1 failure on an actual Samsung model drive. The Summit series used Samsung's first chipset ever and it was really good and reliable (used 4 or 5 Summit drives, only 1 out of those has died), and I used and still own many gen. 2 Samsung drives (the 470 series), all 6 of them are still in use right now. Also used one or two 3rd gen. Samsung drives, the 830 series. And I have a 4th gen 840 Pro and 840 EVO drive. Also own a couple Intel drives too, and one Corsair (The Corsair also has a Samsung chipset). The only drives I no longer use are the OCZ ones, because they all died. Oh and a Patriot drive that was one of the first SSDs ever made too, a true first gen solid state. It used a terrible jmicron chipset and it died too.

A lot of people are probably going to start calling BS on some things I say, cause it seems like I had used or own just about everything. lol. And that is a LOT of SSDs to have used... But if you want Ill throw up some pictures of a bunch of my drives so you can see the collection
Actually here ya go, these are two that were within arms reach of me right now.

 

lol sorry. it doesnt look like that much text to me because my monitor resolution is really high.
We havent had new chipsets for a while now, but saw some rumors of things from Sandforce, Indilinx, and JMicron. I havent heard anything about new chipsets from Samsung or Intel, though I am not sure Intel will make their own chipsets anymore since they moved to custom firmware Sandforce chipsets a little while back. With all the sales going on as of late I would definitely expect some new products to be dropping soon, though I cant say for sure because I honestly dont keep up that much on solid state drives compared to other hardware.
Whether new products will matter much I don't really know. Current SSDs are so fast no one can tell the difference between any models except when running a benchmark. New drives will probably be faster, but we still wont be able to tell. I would also expect lifetime to drop substantially in newer drives, down to the 840 EVO level. Not that lifetime matters either though, even the lowest lifetime drive on the market (Samsung 840 EVO) could write a 5-10 gigabytes per day, every day, for longer than you will be alive for before the drive wears out. Current real world testing has shown the 840 EVO to still be going with over 500 terrabytes of data written to it. SSDs tend to fail not because their NAND chips wear out,l but because of power regulation failures or chipset failures.

 

I take back what I said about Intel and their new controllers. After actually looking more into SSDs since my last post I see that I missed the launch of the new 730 series (article was dated just from yesterday so give me a break ok?), this drive uses their own proprietary controller once again. This controller is from on of their datacenter model SSDs and the NAND chips are also enterprise grade chips (but again, not that the NAND endurance matters...). The controller is factory overclcoked though from the speeds the actual datacenter models run at. Which I guess means I need to own one now because I have never overclocked a SSD controller yet, and that is just a shame in my PC. I have overclocked the sata bus going to SSDs though with some nice gain. The speed on this new drive looks pretty good though the Samsung drives and Sandforce based drives are still faster, and the lowest end drive is rated for 50GB of data written per day.

 

I really do want to buy one or two and play with them for a while, but it would take a year or two before I could give that series specifically the same sort of recommendation I give the Samsung's. I can say the new Intel drive should be plenty good, because Intel has a fairly good track record. But I would probably stay away for a couple months at first with this drive. Intel always has great drives too after the first few months of a new chipset generation. Their G2 series (2nd gen Intel) had a firmware bug in it that caused data loss and had to be updated to fix it, then they had a small issue with the Sandforce based drives at first too. And I cant be sure, but I kinda remember their gen 1 drives also had a small issue the first month or two as well. It always gets fixed and then the drives are 100% solid, but Intel's track record shows that their newest drives should always be avoided the first 2-3 months just so everyone else can test to make sure there isnt a new bug that needs fixing.

Crucial has had some issues too, mainly with compatibility on certain platforms (Crucial M3 and Intel Sandy Bridge was terrible at first). Their controller chips are usually Marvel or JMicron based and so they tend to have an issue here or there.

OCZ, Corsair, Toshiba, Patriot, Sandisk, etc etc etc who all used Sandforce based chipsets have had numerous issues. It took 2 or 3 years for the bugs to get ironed out so that Sandforce based drives were good. And really it is only because of Intel that these chipsets even work decent, because Sandforce refused to acknowledge any issues with their controller. At least until they were allowed to use many of the bug fixes Intel came up with for the controllers for their own drives. It is a pretty shady company really. OCZ stands out above the rest for failures for 2 reasons: they sold the most drives so they were the biggest name, and they had no QC of any kind and the drives were straight from the generic Sandforce designs out of the factory and into boxes. The firmware was not even tested because multiple times it was pushed 0-day from Sandforce servers to the OCZ website for download. This caused OCZ rives to have higher failures than even other Sandforce based brands and gave them such a bad rep that the company failed. The scariest drive I have ever seen was an OCZ RevoDriveX2 product. It not only took the bad quality Sandforce 1222 controller and used it in what OCZ called an "Enterprise" product, but they stacked FOUR OF THEM into one drive and used a RAID0 setup for the drive. I was horrified when I saw it. Partly cause I knew how bad the controller was, partly because I have had personal bad experience on the OCZ drives, and partly because I owned a RevoDrive 1st gen and knew just how bad they were.

The Kingston V300 drives are quite popular because they are cheap fast drives, but be careful because the speeds shown in reviews are from the 1st batch of drives. Recently Kingston switched from the Toshiba Toggle NAND that the drives were reviewed with to much slower Micron Asynchronous NAND that on average makes the V300's only half as fast as they used to be and what you see in the reviews for the drives. Kingston finally fessed up to the switch after the evidence against them was too great. Corsair is known for the same bait and switch tactics on their RAM and PSUs, no one has mentioned the same for their SSDs but I would be careful of Corsair drives too because of how the company works.

The Samsung drives have never had any such an issue, in any of their generations. 1st gen Samsung drives were not made by Samsung, the controllers were only enterprise based and 3rd party companies had to create drives that used the Samsung design. These were quite reliable, and I think only OCZ and Corsair made drives with these controllers, and only for a VERY short while. OCZ stopped because the drive outshined their Indilinx based Vertex drive. I cant remember why Corsair stopped making them.
2nd gen Samsung drives were the 470 series, and Samsung's first time releasing their own branded drive into the consumer market (previously they only sold to enterprise customers). The consumer drive was nearly an exact copy of the enterprise version except for MLC based NAND instead of SLC. The drives had no issues of course and I still have 5 in use right now. Then the 820 series came out, it had no issues but the drive was quickly outdone in speed by the competitors new designs and the drive was very short lived. I think I might have owned one of these too but cant be sure... Then came the 830 series. Also good, but somewhat short lived. Then next was the 840 series stuff which is still sold. I own a few 840 based drives, some EVOs and a Pro. These still of course have no issues just like all their other drives. I have no real problem recommending any future Samsung drives that come out, even if I havent tested them mysef for many months because the track record has been proven over and over for many years now. I would be very surprised if I ever found a SSD made by Samsung to have a bug in it. That isnt to say the drives will be 100% flawless for every person on the planet for all time, drives do fail because of various reasons and no company is immune to this. Just that the failure rates on Samsung (and Intel overall) is significantly lower than any other company in the solid state market and their drives have never had a bug in the controller firmware that caused drive failures.