With December coming to an end we'll post the last update on the OCZ Test panel.  Ten of our Guru3D forum members received a OCZ Storage Solutions Vertex 460A SATA3 480GB SSD, and we are following these guys for these two years. 

All SSDs in active test group are functioning and running really well. None have failed or are showing anomalies. It is quite interesting to see the actual usage flow of ten people at the same time, producing roughly the same performance results over and over again. The Vertex 460A SATA3 480GB SSD certainly isn't slowing down and several members now have written multiple terabytes of data on the SSD. Each month each participant will post their status on the SSD in our forums alongside with an overview of SMART info, TB written, lifespan expectancy and of course performance. This is an open project meaning everything gets reported transparently each month in the forum thread with a screen-shot or two running validation and test software. The good but also the bad will be reported. User feedback based on real-world user experiences. 

We are now at month Eight .. this month we I will focus on our Ancient Guru, Solfaur. He reached a modest 6 TB of data written (host writes). The SMART readouts are 100% as well as life expectancy / life time remaining. Below if you click the thumbnails you can see the SMART data of his SSD and performance scores. 

Solfaur comment: "All is good with the SSD. As a side note, I bought a 6TB HDD and discarded some of my old 1TB HDDs, so I'm doing a lot of moving around with game folders/onedrive, backing up etc. When I'm all done, I'll finally upgrade to Windows 10 as well."

Did the test panel make you think of buying an OCZ SSD but do you still have some questions that need answering? Instead of having to search the internet to find the answer to your last remaining question OCZ now offers technical support via their new SSD Gurus Facebook page. Whether you want to make sure the drive you have in mind is compatible with your system, or you have a questions related to the warranty, a question send during office hours will be answered within the hour saving you some valuable time and effort. Furthermore OCZ’s ShieldPlus warranty system also removes the need to save the purchase receipt for warranty claims. So if you don’t feel like filing yet another purchase receipt or don’t want to give the receipt along with the drive when you give it as a present, you can be sure your warranty is covered. Not sure if your drive has ShieldPlus warranty support? Please be sure to check it out on this page. 

Below if you click on the thumbnail(s), these are the results from Solfaur, almost nine months into the group test. That's it for this months update, if you like to follow the test-panel you can do so in this forum thread.