Beware of OWC SSDs!

[besweeet2]

Back in September, I received a 240GB SSD for my 2012 MacBook Air. It arrived dead and unusable. I sent them that drive back, and they said that it was very unusual what happened. The replacement that they sent me worked without a problem, up until about 30 minutes ago.

I was browsing Twitter via Tweetbot and watching a video via VLC. First, the video froze. Next, I wasn't able to interact with anything on the screen. Lastly, the cursor wouldn't move. All of this happened within a few seconds of each other.

Upon reboot, I received the flashing folder with the question mark. Holding ALT while powering up results in no drives/partitions detected. When I booted from my Mac OS X installation USB drive, it didn't detect any sign of a SATA drive from within Disk Utility or anywhere else.

I popped in my original/stock 120GB Apple SSD, the one that came with the Air, and it booted up without a problem. Unfortunately, it hasn't been used since September, and I [stupidly] haven't made a backup since then, so I have quite a bit of work to do to get things back to the way I just had them. Fortunately, a lot of my data is scattered around various clouds, so I mainly just need to install the various software updates that have occurred over the past 3 months.

So, based on my experience, I would advise everyone to stay away from OWC. While people may have their own success stories, I definitely have none, and I've heard about more failures from OWC drives than many of their competitors.

[jessica.]

I think all drives have a failure rate but my question is whether you googled your specific drive to see if there's a high reported failure rate? You owe yourself that much at least.

[besweeet2]

Originally Posted by jessica.

I think all drives have a failure rate but my question is whether you googled your specific drive to see if there's a high reported failure rate? You owe yourself that much at least.

I haven't found anything in regards to their MacBook Air-specific drives' success or failure rate.

[jessica.]

Originally Posted by besweeet2

I haven't found anything in regards to their MacBook Air-specific drives' success or failure rate.

What about the drive you bought? What was the drive model exactly?

[besweeet2]

Originally Posted by jessica.

What about the drive you bought? What was the drive model exactly?

They only offer one 240GB SSD for the MacBook Air, so http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/SSDAP2A6G240/.

[jessica.]

From reviews from respected sites, I would certainly believe this was a great performer. Can you check into perhaps getting another through warranty? Just over a year seems a bit soon for a drive to fail.

[besweeet2]

Originally Posted by jessica.

From reviews from respected sites, I would certainly believe this was a great performer. Can you check into perhaps getting another through warranty? Just over a year seems a bit soon for a drive to fail.

It was a review unit, so I'm not concerned about getting another (third) one. Two bad drives within 3 months can't be a good sign in terms of reliability.

[ChrisMan287]

There's another thread on here with people having the same issues with OWC SSDs on their '12 Airs as well. Chime in if you haven't already:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1459847

[jessica.]

Originally Posted by ChrisMan287

There's another thread on here with people having the same issues with OWC SSDs on their '12 Airs as well. Chime in if you haven't already:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1459847

There you go then.