Are OCZ drives any better than they were ever? I seem to hear that name come up as the brand to avoid more often than others (other than Intel because of the price premium).
Every company has different phases of good and bad series. It's hard to generalize like this. Often, the people that have bad experiences are also the loudest. There are no other company that came out with more SSD models than OCZ. Having said that, with one of the largest market share of SSD, there are bound to be people that have problems, but this doesn't necessarily mean that they have the highest percentage of lemon rate. Even a very small percentage of problems will translate to many complainers because of their sheer volume. I've personally owned nearly all generations of OCZ drives except the newest vertex/agility 4. Their first few SSDs that came into the market (Core series v1) was complete garbage, and needed many tweaks just to get it working properly. When vertex/agility 1 entered with 3rd party indilinx controllers, this was a milestone for performance and reliability for them. Then when sandforce controllers were introduced, the Agility 3 I had had problems with crashing. After many firmware flashes, it finally fixed the problem. The vertex 2 had no problem, although it was also sandforce-based.
I just want to reiterate that no SSD company has a perfect record. Even a highly reliable company like Intel had 2 noteable problems: one was from the x25m firmware flash and the other was from one of their newer sandforce drives. Having said all this, OCZ is not a brand I would personally praise, but at the same time not a company I would consider bad-mouthing to friends. If you need something reliable, then perhaps Intel or Samsung SSD's are the way to go. Although nowadays, most company's flagship SSD's are generally pretty reliable without sacrifice to performance.
Woooow, Samsung BIOS is nice and quick. I have several SSDs so the rest isn't impressive anymore
I also think desktop motherboards needs more optimization in BIOS boot. Notebooks and ultrabooks nowadays are faster at booting through bios until it starts to load the OS.