I bought 8 of these this spring (back when they were $400 a piece...) for use in my 4 BMD HyperDeck Studio recorders and now 6 of 8 of them do not mount, do not show up in Disk Utility, OCZ's own firmware updater and/or on Windows 7.

OCZ service is BECOMING frustrating as they seem to think the problem is my external BlacX USB3 and USB2/SATA mounting adaptors but the two that are still working, work fine in this scenario.

They ARE listed by BMD as being acceptable for this application and until they suddenly stop mounting, have been plenty reliable.

I did the firmware update on all of them months ago with no issues resulting.

did you try a disk rescan under
control panel>administrive tools>Computer management>Disk management
is the Vertex listed there?

We had a client with 10 of the OCZ Vertex 3 drives. 6 of them failed. They all failed upon unmounting the drive. No data was lost.

OCZ replaced the SSD drives and they were no longer used for recorders, only inside machines.

We previously recommended the OCZ line because they were listed on the BMD site and Atomos site. Atomos has taken them off, and I wish Blackmagic would as well. We've switched over to the Samsung line and have had a much better success rate. Our apologies for recommending the OCZ line, they worked well at first during our initial testing. It's as you found, that after a few recordings that they go south.

The primary reason is that Sandforce and it's firmware is still not reliable enough. People have been experiencing BSOD bugs on Windows because the drive (in the case it is the OS drive) loses connection after being powered on for a while.

Same goes with the Intel Sandforce based drives.

Good move on recommending Samsung. The only real issue that might come up is that some Samsung drives may be TLC (Triple Layer) flash chips and that is slower than MLC chips. Also, some smaller architectures (20nm or below) may not last as long when in a daily recording environment.