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Upgrading an OCZ Onyx SSD drive

A while ago, maybe 2 years, maybe 18 months, I bought an OCZ Onyx 32GB SSD drive to put in my Soekris net5501 server under FreeBSD. The idea was that since that machine doesn't get lots of writes, it would benefit heat-wise and speed-wise from having a SSD drive rather than a regular 2.5" laptop drive (which always seem to fail after about 2-4 years of continuous operation).

Well, I have been quite disappointed, because after only a few months of operations, the Onyx started developing a number of read errors and bad sectors. I restored from backups a few times, but eventually it got so bad that I went back to a simple laptop drive for greater reliability.

When I bought a new PC recently, I remembered my Onyx and tried to use it to accelerated my disk accesses through intel's Rapid Storage caching Technology. Well, that didn't work at all because it developed read errors within 24 hours, and so I gave up on that idea and ordered a small Intel drive to use as a cache in my system (which seems to work fine).

Now, being somewhat stubborn, I surfed the web and found that OCZ had a firmware update for my 32GB Onyx drive (upgrade to 1.7)... so I upgraded the firmware to 1.7, and now the drive is in a very strange state: not only does it report that it has a capacity of 128GB (which is quite strange), but also I cannot seem to pqrtition/format it properly in Windows 7 or with the UBCD.

So, I guess I have reached the end of how much time I am willing to devote to this piece of junk, and send it into the recycle bin... truly one of the least positive hardware purchases I have ever made.

/hardware | Posted at 17:33 | permanent link