Why I no longer buy OCZ Technology products

[Update: As of 12/2013 OCZ has filed for bankruptcy. The articles I have read discuss changing markets, poor strategic decisions, and problems with corporate acquisitions as the main reasons. I can't help wondering if OCZ's total disregard for the happiness of its customers could have been a contributing factor.]

[Update2: Toshiba has purchased the majority of the assets of OCZ Technology. The sale was completed on 1/21/2014. The Toshiba subsidiary is now named OCZ Storage Solutions. I hope that Toshiba will lead OCZ to be more customer focused, though I have had no further contact with OCZ, OCZ support or OCZ products.]

Recently I decided to build myself a new, screaming fast, ultra-quiet desktop computer. The centerpiece of this new machine was to be the latest and greatest in super-high-speed, zero noise storage devices – the OCZ Technology RevoDrive X2.

The fastest types of storage devices commercially available today are "solid-state drives (SSD's.)" These drives use transistors instead of spinning disks to store data. Thus, they are extremely fast and make no noise. Historically SSD's have been manufactured to look and act just like traditional hard disks drives. This was done for backward compatibility. OCZ realized that they could squeeze even more performance out of these devices by breaking with that constraint. Thus was born the OCZ RevoDrive X2, an SSD that plugs into a PCI slot on a computer's motherboard, thereby providing bleeding-edge performance. Needless to say, it was a must-have for my new über-machine.

I spent a week carefully choosing the components for my machine and placing orders from various vendors. When the parts arrived, I gleefully constructed my new killer computer. After building it and loading all my software, I was dismayed to find that its performance was not particularly impressive. It didn't seem to be any faster than my prior machine. In particular the hard disk access (or should I say SSD access) was no great shakes. Moreover, it would seem to lock up from time to time, especially when installing new software (which I was doing a lot in those first few days.)

I decided to run the Windows Experience Index (WEI) to see how Microsoft thought my machine stacked up. To my amazement the WEI showed a reading of only 5.9 for the drive. [The peculiar scale of the WEI runs from 1 to 7.9 – don’t ask me why.] While a reading of 5.9 isn't dismal, I had assumed that the fastest drive money could buy would score a perfect 7.9. Also, my previous computer with an older, earlier generation, ordinary SSD had scored 7.1 on the Windows Experience Index. Clearly something was very wrong.

I surfed to the OCZ Technology website looking for answers. Unfortunately OCZ’s website is very short on support. There is a lot of information about OCZ products, especially documents explaining why SSD's are so wonderful – in particular why OCZ SSD's are supposed to be so great. There are a few brief FAQs, but not much else. It takes quite some time to discover that there's really nothing there, as there is a tremendous amount of marketing materials and other non-relevant, non-support, information under the “support” heading.

It appears that OCZ wants you to find your answers on their community based forums – hosted on a separate web site. There I found several discussion threads created by people experiencing the exact same problem: strange system slowdowns, lockups especially installing new software, and most interestingly, the same 5.9 on the WEI – everyone was reporting this same odd number. Though it was clear that dozens of people were having the same problem, no one from OCZ tech support had weighed in on the matter. All the forum entries were by consumers.

Reading through the forums learned that the benchmark by which OCZ tests its products is a performance test called ATTO Disk Benchmark. So I downloaded ATTO and ran it. ATTO showed that the drive was running spectacularly fast, as advertised. This confusing result was the same that was reported by the other users having problems with these drives: superfast performance on this ATTO synthetic benchmark, mediocre results on a benchmark created by Microsoft (about which no one really knows the details,) and truly disappointing real-world performance. I posted my own info on the forum in the hopes that yet another piece of data might lead to discovery of a solution.

I waited several days, trying various fixes on my own and looking forward to a reply on the forum, but OCZ support was MIA. Finally I went back to the main OCZ Technology website to see about getting some real support. There they tell you that they want you to create an online trouble ticket before calling on the phone. So, I created a trouble ticket pointing to the forum entry that I had written and noting that OCZ should really pay attention to the fact that there were a dozen or more people experiencing the same problem.

A couple of days later a support engineer replied to my trouble ticket stating simply that ATTO is the benchmark they use. A good performance result on ATTO means the drive is working. They marked the ticket “closed.” That was it. Nothing else. No mention of the slow system or lockups, and no recognition of the fact that others were experiencing the problem. I had spent hours futzing with the machine: moving the RevoDrive card from one slot to another; uninstalling and reinstalling device drivers; downloading, installing and running various diagnostic and tuning software; adjusting configuration parameters for Windows and for the other devices in the system; and on and on. Nothing worked. Getting such a useless reply to my trouble ticket was definitely annoying.

I then called OCZ customer support during their limited phone support hours. The engineer I spoke to was very pleasant. He agreed that someone really should be replying to the posts on the forum. He told me that they have dedicated engineers whose job it is to monitor and reply to postings. He promised me that he would get in touch with them and make sure that someone responded to this issue. With regard to my machine, he told me that these problems were almost always problems with other devices in the system. As a result, he said, it was basically impossible for OCZ support to help customers such as myself. He said that I needed to look in the Windows event logs for errors which would help me figure out which device was causing the problem.

So I spent several hours studying the errors and warnings in the event logs. If you've never done this, it is a very painful process. Some of the errors are clear and obvious, but many are exceedingly cryptic. I worked and worked to correct any errors I was able to decipher, though none seemed particularly pertinent, and none of my changes improved anything.

A couple weeks later, with my system still performing erratically, I went back to the OCZ forums where I found even more customers complaining of the exact same problem, but still no comments from OCZ. I called OCZ tech support once again. Once again I spoke to a very pleasant support agent who agreed with me that this was a problem and assured me that someone would read through the forums and reply to postings, even if such a reply was merely to inform people that we must solve the problem ourselves by examining our Windows error logs.

I never did solve the problem. About two weeks after that call my RevoDrive went kaput. From another machine I went to the OCZ forums looking for advice to see if there was any way to salvage the drive. There I found countless other postings by people complaining of the exact same failure that I had just experienced. [The 240Gb RevoDrive X2 is internally really four 60Gb drives in a RAID0 configuration. The system reported that one of the four drives had failed, rendering the RAID0 inoperable.]

In this case OCZ customer support had been replying to users’ complaints. The standard reply advised shutting down the machine and unplugging the power for one hour to completely clear the memory and system BIOS settings. Everyone who was experiencing the problem and tried this replied that it hadn’t fixed the problem. Failing that, apparently the only option was to return the drive for replacement. According to many posters this could take a month or more (which is completely unacceptable.)

Just for yuks I posted my own information to the forum about my RevoDrive dropping dead. In response to my posting, OCZ customer support told me to unplug the machine for an hour. Surprise, surprise! It did no good. Furthermore, in their reply OCZ tech support pointed me to the forum rules which state, quote:

Moving forward there will be a dual 3 strike rule, you have 3 posts or 3 warnings to add user system details, after that you will be placed under moderation and no help or advice will be offered.

I can't tell you how warm and fuzzy it makes me feel to have a company's customer support organization tell me that if I don't provide them with all of the information they ask for I will be cut off from assistance. So, not only is OCZ tech support useless, they are also rude. . Keep in mind that this is a very expensive drive that didn't work correctly from day one and cost me many hours of my valuable time. This SSD alone costs more than many computers. It is fair to say that I paid a premium price for a premium product. I think OCZ should provide premium support for such a product, and they should provide that support without the attitude. A policy warning me that I am out in the cold if I don’t deign to give them every system stat they want up front is lame, lame, lame.

At this point I had no desire to own another OCZ drive and I certainly wasn’t about to wait a month to get a replacement. Unfortunately, by now I had owned the unit past the point where Amazon will accept returns on computer disk drives. My previous SSD had been from Intel – a company known for the reliability of their SSD's. I decided to just say goodbye to the money I had spent on the OCZ. I went on Amazon.com, where I placed an order for the latest and greatest Intel SSD, which is plenty fast and reputed to have rock-solid reliability. I also sent an e-mail to Amazon.com customer support telling them about my experience and asking if they would be willing to take the RevoDrive back. The next day I received a reply from Amazon with an RMA number and a UPS shipping label to return my broken RevoDrive for a 100% refund. Yay Amazon!

It is important to remember that OCZ technology is a company that relies on "influential early adopters" like me. Their customers are people who are into technology and willing to pay extra for the newest and best hardware products. They are also dependent on the type of customer that Malcolm Gladwell dubbed “mavens,” in his book The Tipping Point – customers who make markets by communicating their experiences to others.

It is suicide for a company like OCZ Technology to ignore dozens of reports on their forums. In most businesses it is assumed that if there is one customer complaining there are probably tens, hundreds, or even thousands of people with the same problem. Those multipliers are somewhat lower in the world of bleeding-edge technology where customers are likely to go to the forums when they experience problems. Still, if there are a dozen people complaining about slow and flaky SSD’s, there are probably hundreds of disgruntled customers out there experiencing these problems to one degree or another.

OCZ is failing to support their most important customers – those vocal, early adopters that make or break a new technology. I have never needed their customer support before, but now that I have experienced the fact that they are clearly shipping out products that are not ready, and are then failing to support them, I have concluded that they are not company that I want to do business with. There are dozens of component manufacturers vying for dominance in this marketplace, so there is no need to patronize one that has failed so badly and with such apparent arrogance.

Normally I wouldn’t write a company off based on one bad experience, but in this case, both the product and support were so bad that OCZ is on my “black list.” I encourage others to avoid the OCZ RevoDrive X2, or, at least to read the OCZ forums to see what users are saying before investing in this expensive, half-baked product.

Dazzled by nature's beauty

I was making a pot of coffee this morning when I was stopped in my tracks by the view out my window.

I am always fascinated by the fact that humans find things in nature beautiful - even when those things have forms and functions entirely unrelated to us. A spider makes a web to catch insects, not to please people with its geometry. Dew forms on the web because of the laws of chemistry and physics. Sunlight sparkles off the dewdrops, again due to physics, not through a desire to dazzle the human eye.

Enjoying the flowers of a newly developed rose or a tulip straight from Holland is no great surprise. Horticulturalists worked hard to hybridize those flowers to appeal to us. That we find beauty in the unadorned natural world is less clear - though it too makes perfect sense. Assuming that you believe the theory of evolution (which is a safe assumption, given that 100% of credible evidence supports it,) it is clear that everything that has made the natural world what it is, has also made us what we are. The forces that created nature also created homo-sapiens. Form and function, symmetry, color, the signals of ripeness and poison, the scents that attract or repel - all of these things are built in to every living thing on earth.

So really, it is no great surprise to be dazzled by dewdrops on a spider's web in the morning. Still, it is no less a delight.

NAS, Media Servers, Backing up my network, and Norton Ghost 15

How to make Norton Ghost 15 do a remote backup on Win7 x64, plus thoughts on Network Attached Storage and backing up machines.

Note: This is a very special-interest blog... just passing along some things I learned. This will probably not be interesting for most readers.

A while back I bought a NAS (network attached storage) machine on sale to see how I liked it. It came with Microsoft Home Server installed as the operating system. I liked it, but the NAS itself was quite slow - in particular it had a rather lame network card, which is stupid for a NAS device. I also have a full-blown PC on my network which I was using to serve media. I had imagined moving the media to the NAS and retiring the PC, but the NAS wasn't up to the job. So, I retired the NAS instead and kept the PC server.

There was one thing that I had really liked about Microsoft Home Server on the NAS: it was very easy to set it up to backup all of the machines on my network to the NAS every night. It did this using a "pull" methodology (ie - the NAS grabbed data off of the target machines), rather than "push" (where the machines to be backed up run software that puts data on the NAS's disks.) I liked the pull methodology quite a lot - it offloaded the task to the NAS, centralized administration of the backups, and made it easy to schedule the backups so that they happened sequentially, thereby not overloading the NAS.

I wanted to make that happen with my server machine. I couldn't find any way to get the backup features of Microsoft Home Server onto Windows 7 using any Microsoft product - Why? God knows. I happened to have a copy of Norton Ghost 15 that I got for free in a combo deal with something else I had bought, so I figured I'd try that out. Well, it was a complete and total pain in the ass and took hours and hours including a 1/2 hour completely useless online chat session with Norton tech support, and another 1/2 hour session on the phone with Norton with a support agent who knew about half of the answers I needed.

The following is a writeup of how to get this to work. However, after getting it set up I quickly concluded that Norton Ghost 15 just doesn't cut it. It does not provide the granularity of backup that I want. As far as I can tell, it only allows backing up of a machine's system files, or entire disk(s). You cannot choose specific sub-directories. So, after all that work I almost immediately abandoned Ghost. I am now running scheduled tasks on each of the target machines to push data to shares on my server. That works just fine, though I do miss the centralized administration. Oh well.

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Note: all my machines are running Win7 Ultimate 64bit with Windows Firewall. These steps may or may not work on other versions of Ghost or other versions of Windows.

For convenience I will refer to the machine that is performing the backups as the "server," and the "remote" machines that are being backed up as "clients."

1) You need to have agent running on any client machine. Ghost cannot perform a remote deployment of Agent to a Win7 machine. So, you must install Ghost on each client machine. The owners manual says:

You must purchase a separate license for each computer you want to manage.You can deploy the agent without a license for a 60-day evaluation. After thattime, you must purchase and install the license to continue managing the remotecomputer.

However, apparently you cant buy licenses for just the Agent, you will need a full license for Ghost for each machine - server and clients. Also, the "60" days is incorrect. It is 30 days.

2) There are three services that must be running for this to work. "Norton Ghost", "Symantec SymSnap VSS Provider", and "SymSnap Service". Launch the services panel by clicking the start button and entering "services.msc" Find each of these services and set them to "Automatic" and start them. I have no idea why Norton install doesn't do this itself. Also, on my machines I set the Norton Ghost service to run as myself instead of the default Local Service. I don't know if this is necessary or not, but haven't had the time to go back and try undoing that to see if Ghost stops working. Also, I did these steps on both the server and client machines - it is possible that it is only required on the server machine. Again, no time to research further.

3) If you are running a firewall, you must allow Norton Ghost and its services through the firewall. I am using the default Windows Firewall. On the forums there are threads that talk about opening various TCP and UDP ports (notably 135, 136, 1345, 1346, 1347). I found this didnt work (as well as being a pain in the ass to do all the steps required to open these ports for each of the services.) What worked for me in this configuration is:

• Launch Control Panel/Windows Firewall.
• Click "Allow a program or feature through Windows Firewall"
• Find Norton Ghost in the list and turn on the check mark. If it isn't in the list, click "Allow another program", find your NG15 install, which is normally C:\Program Files (x86)\Norton Ghost, go to the Console subdirectory, and add VProConsole_.exe. (note the "_" in the name.)
• You will then also need to allow the following programs through as well:
• Console\VProConsole.exe
• Agent\VProSvc.exe

You should reboot the clients and servers, just to be safe. Now, finally, on the server machine you should be able to see the client machine and do a remote backup. Whew.

Why Symantec hasn't documented any of this, and why Ghost install doesn't take care of it, is beyond me. My apologies for not refining this further, but I killed too many hours making this work already - just wanted to quickly write this up for anyone else facing this scenario. I wouldn't be surprised if at least a couple of the above steps can be removed. If anyone has time to refine this, please add to this thread.

Strange Fruit

The tomato plants in my garden haven't quite started producing yet, so, about a week ago I bought two organic tomatoes from my local (non-organic) mega-mart. I used one right away, but found that I didn't need the other, so I left it on my counter (one should never put tomatoes in the fridge - apparently a flavor compound called Z-3 Hexenel is destroyed or hindered by low temperatures.)

Yesterday I wanted a tomato to put on a sandwich. I grabbed the "spare" from the counter and immediately noticed that something was wrong. Very wrong. There were weird green bumps all over the skin (or, more accurately, just under the skin.) Here's a color-enhanced detail:

My first thought was "wow, that's really interesting," followed immediately by the assumption that the tomato was full of insects, which generated the automatic, involuntary, "eeeeewwww, grossssss," reaction.

I took my paring knife and made a slit in the skin while holding the tomato over the sink - I expected that some kind of green grubs would come tumbling out. To my surprise, they weren't grubs at all - they were sprouts! The tomato was red and firm, not mushy or rotten at all, but it was full of sprouting seeds.

I've never seen anything like this happen before, either with fruit from my garden or the grocery store (with the exception of obvious things like onions, garlic, potatoes, sweet potatoes, etc, which often sprout if left unused in the cupboard.)

So, I made my sandwich without any tomato, but, at least I got a good story out of the deal.

(PS: FYI, the label on the tomato said "OriginO / Ocia Canada / Organic Biologic" product code 94664.)

Bizarre Flower du Jour

This strange plant is one of the newer additions to my garden. It is Aristolochia trilobata, a member of a family of vines commonly called "Dutchman's Pipe."  I have three different "Dutchman's Pipes" growing in my garden. While they all have odd flowers, this is by far the strangest.

One of the others that I am growing, Aristolochia 'durior x elegans', has a flower that is much more reminiscent of its English namesake.

A. trilobata is named for its three-lobed leaves. Its flowers are apparently pollinated by flies, as it smells (I kid you not) like a nice, fresh pile of dog poop. I'm not sure of the function of the long streamer that hangs down from the top of the flower's bell. Perhaps a ladder for insects to climb? This one has a streamer that is almost a foot long!

You may wonder why I am growing such a plant. Well, ever since childhood I have been fascinated by oddities in the natural world. Besides, A. trilobata is a nice, easy to grow vine with attractive, shiny foliage.  So why not?

Happy Pie of July

Happy Pie of July Day, also known as The Fifth of July, or Cinco de Julio. This is an ancient holiday in which we remember the sacrifices Paul Revere made to sign the Treaty of Versailles which allowed Queensland to become our 21st state. Traditionally we make pies in commemoration of his dramatic declaration, “Ich bein ein fleischpastete,” which is loosely translated as “I am a meat pie.”

The most traditional of all Cinco de Julio pies is Martha Washington’s Turkey-banana-spam pie, which she famously baked for Stonewall Jackson after the Battle of the Bulge. It was at the meal where this pie was first served that Sir Winston Churchill uttered the immortal words "Let my people go." The recipe follows. 

Ingredients:

1 (8-ounce) can Spam, softened
1 large or 2 medium turkeys, baked or deep fried, boned
14 very ripe bananas
1 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 egg plus 2 egg yolks, slightly beaten
1 cup heavy cream
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) melted butter
1 cup vanilla extract
1/64 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/1492 teaspoon ground ginger, optional
1 piece pre-made pie dough, any size
Emulsified whipped coconut oil product, for topping

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 141 degrees Reaumur (449 degrees Kelvin)

Place 1 piece of pre-made pie dough into a 1 cubit pie pan and press down along the bottom and all sides. Pinch and crimp the edges together making a series of smiley faces. Put the pie shell back into the freezer for 1 week to firm up. Fit a piece of aluminum foil to cover the inside of the shell completely. Fill the shell up to the edges with pie weights or doubloons (about 2 pounds) and place it in the oven. Bake for 10 minutes, remove the foil and weights and bake for another 10 picoseconds or until the crust is dried out and beginning to crumble.

For the filling, puree the Turkey in a food processor or blender. Add the bananas one at a time, making sure that each is fully incorporated before adding the next – this will form a stable emulsion. If the emulsion should break, you will either need to start over, or add a quantity of Jello pudding equal to the volume of the ingredients already pureed. Add the sugar and salt and beat until combined. Add the eggs mixed with the yolks, cream, and melted butter, and beat until combined. Finally, add the vanilla, cinnamon, and ginger, if using, and beat until it surrenders.

Using ½ of the can of Spam, make a layer on the bottom of the pie pan. Pour the filling on top, then add slices of the remaining Spam on top.

Bake for 5 to 432 minutes, or until the center is set. Place the pie on a wire rack and cool to 3 degrees Kelvin. Cut into slices and top each piece with a generous amount of whipped coconut oil product.

Notes:

• Some have suggested that this pie sounds revolting. However, Stonewall Jackson had already had his taste buds shot off by the Viet Cong at Iwo Jima, and so, in making this pie, it really was the thought that counted.
• There are those who have suggested that Martha Washington would have used cranberries instead of bananas, but that is, of course, ridiculous.
• No one knows how a pie baked by Martha Washington for Stonewall Jackson at The Battle of the Bulge became associated with Paul Revere’s exploits at Versailles. This remains a culinary mystery.