14 DAY TRIAL // Recently, we reported about the troubles faced by OCZ with the transition of its SSD line from 34nm to 25nm Flash, and, after numerous complaints have reached the company, OCZ has decided to issue free SSD replacements for those affected by their switch to 25nm NAND.
Many users who bought such drives have found that the available storage capacity as well as the performances were lower than that of the previous generation 34nm SSDs.
Initially, OCZ refused to address these problems as it said that the decreased storage space is caused by the RAISE technology used in the SSD's SandForce controller, which wants to increase the provisioning space in order to compensate for the decreased durability of the 25nm NAND.
OCZ said that the controller automatically adjusts this parameter and that it can't be manually overridden.
In addition, the company refused to acknowledge that the new drives offer lower performances than their 34nm counterparts.
However, as StorageReview reports, OCZ has now completely changed its policy regarding this problem and has decided that customers who were affected by this issue are eligible to receive an updated 25nm SSD.
OCZ will pay for shipping both ways, and all that the users have to do is to file a support ticket on the company's website (link here).
Major retailers, such as NewEgg, are also accepting returns on the drives and offer full refunds even on opened drives.
The performance loss was caused by OCZ's decision to install just 8 memory chips in the SSDs, in comparison with the 16 found in the 34nm version of the drives, effectively disabling half of the memory channels available to the SandForce controller.
This lead to slower write speeds under certain conditions, especially when lower capacity SSDs were used, like the 60GB Vertex 2.
The updated version of the drives will have all the memory channels filled with 32Gb ICs as well as lower RAISE requirements.