OCZ Apex Series OCZSSD2-1APX120G 2.5" 120GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

Pros: Consistent failure of products

Cons: OCZ does NOT stand behind their products
OCZ has ensured I will NEVER be a customer again
OCZ SSDs - How many failing drives does it take ?

Manufacturer Response:

We are sorry to hear about your experience with the Apex SSD. OCZ will definitely stand behind all of our products and back the Apex with a 2-year warranty from the date of purchase. Please visit our Support Forum and we will attempt to help however possible. Thanks!

External Link(s):

OCZ Support Forum|

Pros: Super fast burst rate.

Usual SATA Simple setup tested with 3 different Motherboards.

Cons: OCZ, Please fix this drive by providing us with an Official updated Firmware!

Seems unusable as a system drive. which is the reason I paid a small kings ransom for it.

This drive does sacrifice the basics to achieve the performance. I've had many months tweaking my OS to try and achieve a fluid operation but this drive puts the OS into a stuttering fit constantly at huge irritation to the user. I've spent a lot of my time watching the forums in hope that OCZ will provide a solution to correct this product. An unofficial fix is available but its clear reading the locked threads on the OCZ forum that there not going to do what they can to make it available.

Other Thoughts: OCZ seem to have a lot of great innovative products. Hopefully they will learn it's the act supporting your old products which makes people purchase you new products.

Latest Equipment: Asus P6T6, 6GB DDR, I7 920, Windows 7(64)

Pros: Sorry for the double post, the page died and I thought I lost the post...

Gave 3 Eggs to "help" balance my double post.

Cons: x

Other Thoughts: This is a followup on my review. I have now placed 3 RMA's for this one drive replacement. I have emailed the RMA manager and called him and left a voice mail (Luckily, I happened to have his email address from my memory replacement that took 3 months). I filled out the advanced form for replacement. Faxed it in. waited... They then closed my ticket... OCZ. really... I have never had this much trouble in replacing failed items with any other company. I have to say you have lost a customer for life.

Manufacturer Response:

Hello, we are sorry that you have had issues communicating with our support department. We don't use email for communication, as it is unreliable (spam issues, etcetera). Customers must use a web based interface. Tickets are closed as a matter of maintenance after a period of time, and we aplogize for yours being closed. Please visit the link below and create a new support ticket. We will get back to you and we will get your RMA processed.
Thank you

External Link(s):

OCZ Support Page|

Pros: Very fast, raid 0 performance in my laptop with only 1 drive. Worked well when it had all good clusters.

Cons: Very Poor RMA support. drive has failing clusters after 4 months of use. sent RMA in to get a response of not in stock. I had sent in a RMA on DDR3 ram 3 months ago and got the same response... to then wait 3 months to get replacement memory. I was told that my SSD RMA would be extended via email and to check later to see if they had stock. They then closed my ticket and did not let me know. I tried to check the RMA online and it said it was closed... So I have a SSD with a 3YR warranty and they have no stock. So I'm supposed to play games with the RMA folks to get a replacement drive. Not very customer focused....

Other Thoughts: I'm a Lan Administrator. I cannot recomment any OCZ products because of there RMA issues. Whats the point of a warranty if you cant get it replaced. In the words of Tommy Boy "If you want me to take a dump in a box and slap a warranty on it. I can. I have time..." In my opinion OCZ is not far from this on memory and SSD so far in my opinion.

Manufacturer Response:

Hello, we are sorry for the problems. I have requested some info from our support department regarding your situation. As these reviews are anonymous, this can be a challenge. Support tickets are closed after about a week as a matter of system maintenance. The correspondence you received should state that this will happen. Please open a new ticket and reference your old ticket number to contact support again. Again, we are sorry for the delay, we normally have stock,and are working on improving that situation.
Thank you

External Link(s):

OCZ Support Page|

Pros: Great performance, raid 0 performance with my laptop with only 1 drive. Great when it worked.....

Cons: OCZ does not keep stock for RMA returns. (memory AND SSD drives it appears from my experience so far...)

After 4 months of use I have bad clusters now. I have sent in an RMA and have asked for a replacement drive under there "3 year" warranty. That's great if they actually carry the product in their stock. I was told to check back next week, (same run around with my memory replacement for my desktop. I waited (3) months, yes 3 months! to get ram. I finally had to start pushing hard for my replacment). I fear this will be the same for the SSD drive replacement since they said they have no stock, said they would extend my RMA, then closed it with out letting me know. I now have to recreate a new RMA... I still have a bad drive and have not gotten a response from the RMA Manager or RMA Technician who said he would extend my RMA in the email he sent me.

Other Thoughts: I cannot in good faith recommend "any" OCZ products for the lack of RMA support. I have emails from them to back up all my claims. I do side work for friends, family and get recommended all the time for other jobs outside of my work as a LAN Administrator. I recommend products all the time to clients to help when I can. I have to say OCZ is now a product I will specifically mention to stay away from... I have a very short list of companies who treat paying customers this way and you have now made the list.

Manufacturer Response:

Hello, we have replied to your 2nd review above.
Thank you

Pros: Very good random read throughput and IOPS. Once you succeed in getting data onto the drive, read performance does not disappoint.

Good luck getting that data onto the drive however...

Cons: Write performance on the drive has degraded to the point that writing anything larger than a few megabytes destroys system performance. Single I/O write times as high as 600ms are not uncommon.

Initial write performance was just fine, near the 'advertised' rate on large, linear writes. However, as time went on (I have been using an OCZ Apex 120G for about 6 months now) large writes to the drive cause the system to become unusable. I/O times while writing to the drive exceed 600ms at times and total throughput drops to sub-1MB/s levels.

Avoid purchase of this drive as a normal system drive, as even simple things like applying patches now wind up taking huge amounts of time. I have moved most apps/games (specifically Steam apps) etc to a normal HDD and have fewer issues now, however OS functions still remain painfully slow when writes are necessary. I will probably wind up tossing this SSD and replacing with a set of cheap 7.2K RPM SATAs.

Other Thoughts: -

Manufacturer Response:

Hello, we are sorry that you are having write speed issues. Your problem sounds unusual, and we would be glad to assist you with troubleshooting on our support forums at the link below.
Thank you

External Link(s):

OCZ Support Forums|

Pros: Was happy until Snow leopard came, read cons for more

Cons: I am having issues while running with snow leopard. My computer hangs after waking up from sleep (have to manual restart everytime). They don't have firmware upgrade for this product. I moved back to older HD with Snow leopard and everything seems to work. Hence looks like it is not compatible with 10.6
Also it runs bit hotter.

Manufacturer Response:

Hello, we will be happy to look into your problem, although this does sounds like an OS issue. Please visit our support at the link below.
Thank you

External Link(s):

OCZ Support Forums|

Pros: I bought it 1 day ago , it work hot 44 C . It is hotter than any HDD for notebook . and it make my new macbook pro's battery go down fast . from 5 hour to 4 hour . dont buy it

Cons: Hot

Other Thoughts: very hot

Manufacturer Response:

Hello, we are sorry that you are having problems with this product. You should not be seeing these high temperatures, and it is not possible that this high quality SSD drive could be draining your battery faster than a standard HDD. Please visit our support forums at the link below and post in the Flash section for assistance.
Thank you

External Link(s):

OCZ Support Forums|

Pros: I have had this SSD for about 3 months now, so I've been able to get a feel for it. The biggest thing you need to do is to align the partition. Google up how to do that. This guy from what i've read is actually two SSDs internally raid0'ed. Anyway, Crystaldiskmark has this guy running 210 mbyte/s read and 157 mbyte/s write on sequential, 194 mbyte/s read and 66 mbyte/s write on 512k. the kicker is in the "other". This is a winner SSD for the money.

Cons: I wish I waited for a Vertex, but honestly, this is still a killer drive, worth every penny.

Other Thoughts: This guy does 20 mbyte/sec read and 1.9 mbyte/sec write in the 4k benchmark. If you're familiar with SSDs, that is some insane speed there. Align your partitions properly, and this guy is a super fast SSD.

Pros: Works great with Windows 7 too. It still needs the tweaks as described by OCZ on the forum, but it's fast and smooth.

Cons: None... price maybe.

Other Thoughts: If your tests peak out a 150MB/sec that means you have the older SATA(1) interface. You need SATAII to get full benefit of this drive. For instance in my older MacBook it maxes out at 150MB/sec for that reason. On Macpro and my PCs it delivers advertised speeds.