I wasn't aware of it before reading into this whole story, but OCZ seemed to have quite a problem with QA. My vertex 2 barely lasted a year before it started going funny, which I put down to bad luck. But now it seems I wasn't the only one.
Go to a few review sites, have the reviews say "OCZ looks fast and good", go away with a good impression. You have to look elsewhere - on forums and the like, all of which are highly variant in quality - to get information about long-term performance. It's compounded when you have a new player or new product lines. Here in this very thread, it has several people saying "OCZ is great".
It's in the finer gradations that it gets murky. Is a 4.5-star drive really better than a 4-star drive?