Lightning Slow

Since May this year (2011) I've been enjoying the slick speeds of an SSD Raid stripeset for my /steam partition. Its was only a two drive stripe but still crazy fast compared to its clunky Magnetic disk counterpart.
Its a pair of OCZ 180GB Vertex-2s, and they look pretty shiny.

Striping two drives together also helps account for the piddly size of SSD drives, doubling up the capacity so my two one-eighties appear as a single 360GB partition. Which is reasonable for /steam as I don't tend to have too much installed at once and its speed that matters.

With only six onboard SATA connectors, assigned to drives for /boot, /data, BluRay and Card Reader using up the last two drives for /steam seemed reasonable and sacrificing RAID-5 Parity saved the purchase cost of a third drive.

Given everything on /steam is DRM'd I can easily reinstall it and in my arrogance decided against fitting an additional SATA card just for the sake of adding a parity disk.  Let Valve mirror my files, why should I have to as well? Besides, the drives are rated at two million hours of reliability.  Thats two-hundred years and some change.  I only need them to be reliable for 10% of that time?  Parity Schmarity I'm going to be fine with a two-drive stripeset.

Local games were shockingly fast - the upgrade broke the back of the data transfer bottleneck. Gigs of data flowed so fast and I started considering that 8GB of RAM wasn't enough and it might be time to step up to sixteen.
Loading times had dropped, map changes were scary fast.  It was a golden time.

And then, within six months tragedy struck. It was the merry month of movember when one of the drives ceased to be, destroying the stripe and losing all data.  That weekend I regained composure, unplugged it and installed the essentials to the remaining disk.  A single SSD for games is still better than a magnetic drive after all. but Less than two weeks later, the second one gave up its will to live.
Well thank you OCZ.  How proud I was of the shiny pair of Vertex-2 drives when they arrived, and how far did I fall when they died, belly up. Two Million Hours of reliability. I call Bullshit. That should mean two hundred years if I ran them 24/7.  I ran them about 6/6 - thats maybe a hundred and fifty hours. like less than 0.01% of their expected lifespan. I don't even know if I want a replacement. Another ticking timebomb waiting to crash and lose all my games again? Pah.

And what would I have gained by adding the extra reliability of a third drive for parity? Three dead drives.
Perhaps I'm being too harsh, and should try again. Give OCZ a second chance. But I've got (e.g. my Boot and Swap drive) SSDs from Crucial that I've had for twice as long and they must have been thrashed harder and still going strong.