Thanks for this review, I was very curious about these 6Gbps Petrol drives from OCZ. Despite being almost as expensive as the faster M4, they are often on special deals so they can be interesting for the right buyer.

While the performance is pretty good, the reliability scores are horrendous on most sites. You also confirmed something odd is going on with your sample. Is there any way to find out what's up? I'm waiting for the followup and the 256GB drive.

The article talked about performance and pricing but not about reliability of Petrol SSDs. I have used 3 Petrol 128GB SSDs in as many months and had found the reliability of all 3 to be pathetic. First SSD refused to boot after just 2 weeks of usage. Second was DOA and the third has started freezing my Windows 7 everyday after just 3 weeks of usage. Life remaining after just 1 month of usage - 93%!! I have been offered Agility 3 by OCZ distributor. I hope it will help me overcome the nightmare I have been in.

The reallocated sectors is a firmware bug, all of them do this as I learned on my first 4 This has finally been fixed in firmware 3.15, but with a major loss in sequential read & write performance. The firmware update resets the reallocated sector count, but it does not reset the degradation that this bug causes to the drive's SSD remaining life value.