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OCZ have been creating Solid State Drives for as long as we can remember. They produced a massive amount of drives years ago featuring the Sandforce 2281 controller and sadly they ran into their fair share of issues. They were then bought over by Toshiba and have been recently focusing on their excellent Barefoot controller. OCZ are aware of negative public feeling and contacted us recently with a rather interesting proposal. They would send us some Arc 100 drives and we would stress test them over a short period of time, until they died – and all with full public disclosure.
While this seemed like a rather radical proposition, I had to make sure that OCZ were not under the impression they could be involved in this process, or to stop us publishing the cold hard facts. They assured me on the phone that this was not the case. They said they had complete confidence in their drives and that they would long outclass their warranty claims. The Arc 100 is not one of their flagship drives either, it is a mainstream unit designed for the mass enthusiast audience.
Their apparent confidence perked my interest.
We decided to accept the challenge from OCZ and we will be putting these drives through intensive ANVIL stress tests, designed to hammer the drives way beyond the level any consumer ever will. OCZ rate the drives under warranty at up to 20GB a day.
Now, most people will not place an ARC 100 drive through a data load of 20GB a day however I was concerned that OCZ might hand pick a single drive, and for accuracy of the results I asked them for at least three drives. The more data we have, the more accurate these results will be after all.
They sent us 5 drives all sealed and shrink wrapped.
The OCZ Arc 100 was an SSD I reviewed way back in August this year – it was a very capable drive, although we never get time to test them long term. The warranty terms state up to 20GB of data transfer a day, across three years. A quick calculation on this equals 7.3TB of data transfer a year. If you multiply that by 3 under the warranty terms, then we end up with 21.9TB of data. Lets round it up to 22TB in total.
We will keep you posted regularly on how the drives are doing. When one fails we will update you all and create a new video while sharing our findings. When all 5 have failed, we will have plenty of data to share with you. OCZ will not be involved in any of this going forward and have agreed to let us post our findings verbatim, live on KitGuru. It really could go horribly wrong for OCZ but they have agreed not to be involved in this going forward. It is in KitGuru's hands now.
As a closing point it is worth pointing out that OCZ have introduced a ‘ShieldPlus Warranty system' which eliminates the requirement for ‘proof of purchase' … if a drive fails. A brand new SSD is shipped to the OCZ customer of the same capacity, in advance. When the replacement is received by the customer they then can then send their old faulty drive back with a prepaid envelope. Yes it all does seem too good to be true, but we can't find any catch.
Anyway, be sure to check KitGuru regularly for updates on this OCZ ‘death test'. This is the first time any SSD company have proposed this idea with us and while OCZ may end up getting burned with our results we do like risk takers.
-Allan ‘Zardon' Campbell, KitGuru Editor In Chief.
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Kitguru says: Will OCZ be able to prove to our readers that their drives can seriously outclass their warranty system or will they end up with egg on their face? Check back soon for an update.
just wondering i know it says 20gb a day but could you not do more then that.As i thought with ssd because there is no moving parts it just works on read and writes so if you did 40gb a day and it fails in 5 months then you could say if it was done at 20gb a day then it would have failed in 10 months. Or am i being stupid ? (which would not be the first)
The time has nothing to do with it, the 22TB is the endurance, once you’ve written that much it’s due to fail. The 20GB/day for 3 years is just an indicator for the consumer, ‘if you use it this much, this is roughly how long it will last’.
You should test them alongside other manufacturers drives for a true comparison -ie http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-two-freaking-petabytes
Epic fail.
You should have bought the drives in retail and then OCZ refunds you. The difference in price for retail drives is mere pocket change for a corporation the size of Toshiba. Even better, buy 5 drives from 5 different retailer! Again, 5 X skipping charges STILL = pocket change for Toshiba! Now, the question becomes WHY it’s not been done that way… There not a single possible augment for, except cherry picking.
Where is your testing/scientific credibility when you can’t 100% grantee the integrity and impartiality of the studied samples for your “test”? OCZ coud be easily tempted to cherry pick components for those drives. By taking your drive from OCZ, you exposed your test results to this reality. Ordering retail would have negated that probability. Very simple logic.
Also, even if OCZ staff would commit on camera for a 100 year MTBF, that’s hot air. Talk is cheap, I want it on paper with the specs and a warranty that reflect those verbal claims. Anything less is pure waste of my time.
Maybe just go buy one at retail and see how it compares to one’s OCZ sent……………
No moving parts, but the method of storing data wears on the storage medium. Time is pretty much irrelevant, it comes down to how many times you write to the cells.
The drives are probably going to write hundreds of terabytes before they kneel.
I facepalmed so hard I broke my hand.
Just wondering if you plan to issue the same sort of challenge to other SSD makers?
Wonder how many would run a mile from such a a challenge?
Personally I bought an “60Gb OCZ Agility 3” a few years back and it’s still going strong, I’ll admit I’ve not been hitting it hard with TB’s of data a day! But it’s used as a general backup portable drive or a boot drive for a Laptop (so multiple wipes and installs of different OS’s over the years!) it’s still going strong well after the warranty period.