Farewell to OCZ Vertex 2

About a week ago, my trusty iMac from 2010 decided to throw a curveball at me. It simply refused to boot, leaving me staring at a blinding white screen with no comforting Apple logo in sight. I tried every keyboard shortcut in the book, but the only one that seemed to do anything was resetting the NVRAM. Much to my relief, the reset worked, and I was greeted with that familiar and reassuringly loud Apple boot sound.

With my iMac springing back to life, my initial fears of catastrophic hardware failure (you know, the motherboard, CPU, or RAM giving up) began to fade. Instead, I shifted my attention towards the SSD. It was only about a year ago that I had replaced the internal DVD drive with OCZ’s Vertex 2 120GB SSD.

As I disconnected the SSD from its SATA cables, my beloved iMac sprang back to life. It became clear that the SSD was the culprit in this booting thriller. A friend of mine had encountered a similar issue with the same iMac model a couple of months earlier, but his experience was slightly less tragic. His SSD had gone completely blank, but with a HDD backup, he was able to recover his data. Unfortunately, I wasn’t as fortunate, as my SSD went kapput. However, I prefer this sudden death to the slow and agonizing decline of a failing drive.

Thankfully, OCZ’s 3-year warranty came to the rescue, and I received a replacement Vertex 3 SSD. With this new drive in hand, I was able to restore my system from a Time Machine backup. This whole episode served as a stark reminder that having an SSD in your computer today without a reliable day-to-day backup is a disaster just waiting to happen.