Late last year I decided to migrate some of my PCs to SSD boot drives. One of the drives I bought was by OCZ, an Agility Series 120GB 2.5″ drive. Its performance turned out to be very good and I had zero problems with it — until now.
I had to move the drive into another PC. So, I popped open the PC chassis, took hold of the freely dangling drive with my right hand and proceeded to remove first the power connector, then the SATA cable. I must’ve done this same procedure maybe hundreds of times with SATA drives in the past. At this point I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. It was only when I was trying to re-connect the drive that I noticed something was amiss.
Unfortunately I didn’t fathom the exact nature of the problem right away and actually made the damage worse by using the same cable, which unbeknownst to me had a piece of plastic stuck inside the connector. One of the pins on the drive got slightly bent and my jiggling of the ill-fitting connector damaged another tiny piece of plastic next to the drive connector.
Puzzled by the connector’s behaviour I took a closer look at the cable and noticed there was something inside the connector. Comparing the drive’s SATA connector to another drive I immediately saw the guide had come off with the cable. This had never happened to me before, and I still can’t say with 100% certainty why it happened now. My guess is that the SATA cable had been applying pressure on the guide at an angle, the plastic had weakened under the pressure and the guide snapped off when I removed the cable.
When I tried to remove the guide from inside the connector with tiny tweezers, my first attempt was rewarded by a tiny piece of the guide breaking off, leaving the rest of the guide in the connector. I had applied very little force, and the plastic guide simply crumbled when grabbed with the tweezers. The plastic used by OCZ has to be the weakest I’ve ever seen; no way should it be this brittle and easy to break.
Things took a turn for the worse when I contacted the retailer for warranty repairs. According to OCZ, their warranty does not cover physical damage so there’s nothing they can do. To fix the problem they’d have to replace the entire PCB, OCZ replied, and it’s apparently something they’re not willing to do.
So, where does this leave me? With a lump of modern storage technology worth 250 Euros that’s been rendered totally useless by the breaking off of a very tiny piece of plastic. Imagine that.