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econgeek

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 8, 2009
337
0
Bought a Mercury Extreme Pro SSD for my 2011 MacBook Pro. The drive failed after only 14 days. The failure mode is interesting- rather than completely locking up, it will work for about 30 seconds and then stop. So, I am able to boot from the drive, but just browsing around in the finder for will cause it to lock up after a few more seconds. Relocating it to an external case and connecting via firewire produces the same result. Able to access it to read or write for about 30 seconds and then it dies.

I have no idea about the overall reliability of these drives or what might have caused this. I have bought one and it has failed so for me, that's a %100 failure rate. And I lost a bit of data between the Time Machine backups when it failed.

For that reason, I will no longer use Sandforce based drives. And since unmanaged drives are even less trustworthy, that means Intel and possibly crucial seem to be the only viable choices. (My previous SSD was an Intel.)
 

maflynn

macrumors Haswell
May 3, 2009
73,410
43,304
Did you contact OWC regarding this. They typically have excellent support.

by the way, I've been running one since last Christmas and I've not incurred any problems, so its tough to say that all OWC mercury (or sandforce) drives are aweful
 

Bigmacduck

macrumors regular
Feb 15, 2009
228
5
s.h.i.t. happens.

But that one out of on SSD purchased failed does not say anything about reliability. if 99.9% of all drives work, there will be always somebody whose drive is failing. That's why there is warranty and OWC has a great service.
 

econgeek

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 8, 2009
337
0
I don't expect "**** happens" with my main boot drive. I switched to SSDs many years ago to get away from relying on spinning rust.

I, of course, did contact OWC. In fact I contacted Technical Support to see if there was a possibility of fixing the problem without incurring a replacement cost to OWC.

OWC's alleged excellent support has turned out to be anything but. The fact that I contacted tech support first means that I can no longer get a refund (they are not honoring their 30 day "no risk" warranty).

The lesson here is, at the first sign of trouble, return it to OWC because they do not have customer friendly policies or attitude. If I'd done that, I'd be on my merry way and have my money back and go buy a drive I trusted.

Their "30 day" policy starts the day the order is *placed*. Thus the couple days it took them to mail the drive (probably a weekend) and the 15 days it took the drive to get here and the 3 days in customs, all come off of that "warranty" period. Then the drive mostly working for 2 weeks means, and the 2 days I waited for a response to my technical support put me over the "30 days" by about 12 hours.

Those 12 hours meant that OWC has taken the position that I cannot get a refund, I can only get a replacement.

I half expect them to screw me when they send the replacement by not indicating it is a replacement causing me to have to pay another $60 in customs duties.

I've been using OWC as a supplier for all my mac accessories for most of the last decade. I have bought a lot of RAM and external hard drives, and stuff like that from them over those years.

This is the first time I've needed support, or had a problem, and they haven't been interested in honoring the spirit of their warranty, and are effectively punishing me for not immediately RMAing the drive.

Now because I cannot get my money back, I'm going to have to hope that the issue is not a compatibility issue between the Mercury and the SandBridge chipset and put my data at risk again.
 

econgeek

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 8, 2009
337
0
But that one out of on SSD purchased failed does not say anything about reliability. if 99.9% of all drives work, there will be always somebody whose drive is failing. That's why there is warranty and OWC has a great service.

One out of One drives is a %100 failure rate for my sample set. It is a small sample set. However, I can guarantee that across all the drives the reliability rate is *not* %100. SSD drives across the industry have a notoriously high failure rate, a rate higher than Hard Drives, and almost all of this is due to controller issues. (Since it would take a long time to actually wear out the flash.)

There is a 3 year warranty, so I guess if it keeps failing, I can just return it and get another drive, over and over again, until I give up.

I'm hopeful that this replacement drive will last. I don't think anyone is intending to rip me off..... but I haven't gotten great service.

And it is important when there is a failure to report it, because otherwise people get the impression that there are no failures.

We don't know if the failure rate is %20, %15, %10, %5 or what.

People would certainly make buying decisions differently if they knew one drive failed %20 of the time within 6 months and another had a %5 rate over that same period.
 

Capt Underpants

macrumors 68030
Jul 23, 2003
2,862
3
Austin, Texas
Their "30 day" policy starts the day the order is *placed*. Thus the couple days it took them to mail the drive (probably a weekend) and the 15 days it took the drive to get here and the 3 days in customs, all come off of that "warranty" period. Then the drive mostly working for 2 weeks means, and the 2 days I waited for a response to my technical support put me over the "30 days" by about 12 hours.

Those 12 hours meant that OWC has taken the position that I cannot get a refund, I can only get a replacement.

Have you escalated your call to a higher-up? This is pretty terrible...
 
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