OCZ talks about SSD

[DoubleZero]

http://geizhals.at/eu/?fs=ocz+vertex&in=&x=0&y=0

[FZ1]

Yes, there are a bunch of etailers listing them. Can't read German so I don't know if they are in stock there or not (or if it even says).

[SAE]

Not in stock, it says they're ordered. Nice ssds, if they'll perform as advertised. (but not really cheap ones, huh?!)

[alexio]

What about a swappable controller chip (board) in future products? Could that be possible at all? That would be bang for buck!

From my understanding it is still the memory chips itself that are expensive to produce while the controller chip is expensive to design, test, optimize, etc. Since new controller chips are designed for new drives anyway they could be sold fairly cheaply as upgrade parts for older drives.

Do I make sense at all Tony?

[Tony]

What about a swappable controller chip (board) in future products? Could that be possible at all? That would be bang for buck!

From my understanding it is still the memory chips itself that are expensive to produce while the controller chip is expensive to design, test, optimize, etc. Since new controller chips are designed for new drives anyway they could be sold fairly cheaply as upgrade parts for older drives.

Do I make sense at all Tony?

you want a socketed controller...err not doing to happen. To small and hard to socket and be sure signaling would be ok.

[Tony]

Vertex looks to be happening over the holidays, so its looking like you may see drives just after Xmas and between new yrs BUT remember this is a busy time and people book time off...so it may slip a little.

I know etailers are getting SKU'd up now so as soon as we ship stock you can order.

[alexio]

you want a socketed controller...err not doing to happen. To small and hard to socket and be sure signaling would be ok.

Yeah I figured it wouldn't be easy. How many legs do these controller ICs that OCZ uses generally have?

[alfaunits]

We're going OT here, but anyway...
How many complaints about Vista install did you see with other SSDs, and how many with OCZ to date? Quite a difference...
IMO, the actual speed is one thing, not being able to install an OS onto it?? Hell, that's not something that may get through QA testing.

Kudus to OCZ for advancing SSDs though, I've not seen a company push new and new so often, and the market has to follow.

You can't blame OCZ for the controller issues as nearly all SSD drives used this controller.

[alfaunits]

How about fully firmware upgradable controller? makes little business sense, I guess, but it would work..

you want a socketed controller...err not doing to happen. To small and hard to socket and be sure signaling would be ok.

[FischOderAal]

Yes, there are a bunch of etailers listing them. Can't read German so I don't know if they are in stock there or not (or if it even says).

cyberport.de claims to have Vertex-SSDs with 30, 60 and 250 GB on 25.12.2008 and the one with 120 GB on 01.01.2009.

Not my favourite webshop anyway

[T_Flight]

Guys...Merry Christmas. Remember that OCZ wants to have one too.

Ho Ho Ho!!! One week to go! If you haven't ordered those Christmas presents, better get crackin' or they might not make it down the Chimney in time...or the porch in case you don't have a Chimney.

[Tony]

We're going OT here, but anyway...
How many complaints about Vista install did you see with other SSDs, and how many with OCZ to date? Quite a difference...
IMO, the actual speed is one thing, not being able to install an OS onto it?? Hell, that's not something that may get through QA testing.

Kudus to OCZ for advancing SSDs though, I've not seen a company push new and new so often, and the market has to follow.

How about i run the OCZ support forum like our competitors run their forums...hide away all that is bad, remove links and bashing and generally be heavy handed?
That way all you would see on our forum is 1 page of people with good experiences and all would look rosy.

People come to our forum usually when they have an issue, when you sell thousands of drives that means the percentage of people having issues remains around constant but the amount that represents is larger.
So...If you sell 100 drives and 1% have issues that's 1 person posting, if you sell 100,000 drives that is 1000 people posting with issues...looks worse but in reality its not that bad.

Since I posted tweak guides, Rookie posted Steadystate and we cleaned up the SSD forum the general feeling towards Core has somewhat changed.

Here is the best part to all this, 32bit Vista is proving the best OS for us at this time once tweaked. 90% of all the issues installing went away once people started loading the correct driver F6 as well.

The 10% of issues we can not fix are usually due to sata controller settings in bios, or the lack of setting available..SSD drives do like the controller set to Compatible Mode usually but many bios files do not even have the option.

So in many cases a simple bios code change is all that is needed to get the drives working well.

[Mechromancer]

+1, Tony

OCZ's forum has a lot of solutions to any problems people are complaining about. The problem is that people are just complaining and not adding to the solution on these forums. If you spend 5 minutes with Google you can usually figure out the solution to SSD problems. Also if you pay attention to what is going on in the SSD world you would know SSDs are high end components that make good use of other high end components like hardware RAID controllers with onboard cache. OCZ has taken the steps to help us out with even that by adding onboard cache to the Vertex series. We'll of course see if that holds up in a week or two, but that seems to be the primary reason of adding cache and changing the SSD's controller. I don't see any of these other companies with the support level OCZ has either. They have given us nothing but solutions to problems (in English at that) with SSDs.

Anyways, I'm buying two 30GB Vertex SSDs so I'll let you all know how they fare on 790FX/SB750 and/or X58 boards.

[Levish]

How about fully firmware upgradable controller? makes little business sense, I guess, but it would work..

That was the plan with core v2 I believe, its got a usb port intended for firmware upgrades. Its entirely possible Jmicron doesn't have a fix.

[Astri]

I ordered 2 of them already, i hope they will arrive soon

[Helmore]

I ordered 2 of them already, i hope they will arrive soon

I can't wait to hear what you think of them. Some performance benchmarks will be nice, but some subjective information about what kind of difference they gave you in responsiveness of your system is also very nice. I can't wait to have a proper SSD in my system, to bad pricing is still not they way I like it.

[LowRun]

Vertex looks to be happening over the holidays, so its looking like you may see drives just after Xmas and between new yrs BUT remember this is a busy time and people book time off...so it may slip a little.

I know etailers are getting SKU'd up now so as soon as we ship stock you can order.

What happened?

[largon]

Firmware problems, I have heard.

[billdavis]

can somone post a bench of 2 vertex's in software raid 0

780i mobo would be even better

[Miwo]

pretty sure everything has been cross-shipped back to OCZ, where they are reflashing the drives
so delayed by another week or so....... maybe by end of Feb we see some numbers

[Nizzen]

can somone post a bench of 2 vertex's in software raid 0

780i mobo would be even better

Vertex is not yet on the market

We all waiting

[billdavis]

Vertex is not yet on the market

We all waiting

how about Apex?

[affiliate13]

how about Apex?

There are some apex benches on OCZ forum and Benchmark Reviews.

[Tony]

yup Apex...been out a few weeks

[Gabriel Noraa]

The guys at Guru3D already have a review on the 120Gbs Apex. Interesting reading. I will still wait to switch from my core v1 to Vertex.