OCZ Files for Bankruptcy - Toshiba Offers to Buy the Assets
by Kristian Vättö on November 27, 2013 3:30 PM EST
OCZ has just issued a press release announcing their filing for bankruptcy, which was expected since Nasdaq had halted the trading of OCZ stock earlier today. OCZ has had financial issues for quite a long time and it was just a matter of time before the inevitable happened. While OCZ did try to change its course by reforming their product portfolio when Ryan Petersen, the former CEO of OCZ, stepped down, it seems that the efforts weren't enough to make the business profitable.
OCZ leaves behind a noticeable amount of assets, most importantly its engineering teams in California, South Korea and Great Britain thanks to the prior acquisitions of PLX and Indilinx. Toshiba has already offered to buy OCZ's assets but currently there is no certainty on whether the deal will be completed. Toshiba's offer is, as expected, subject to various conditions such as retention of the employees because it obviously makes no sense to buy the assets unless Toshiba also gets the immaterial capital that is integrated into the employees. We'll have to wait and see how the deal turns out but at this point I recommend not buying any OCZ products because there is no guarantee that warranties will be honored.
It's sad to see OCZ going because they've been one of the pioneers in the consumer SSD industry. They were one of the most active companies when we started to see the first consumer SSDs in 2008/2009 but OCZ lost a ton of sales once Samsung and other major OEMs began to take the consumer SSD market seriously. It's hard to say what ultimately killed OCZ without knowing their exact cost structure but I believe it was a combination of bad strategy (too many products and high production volumes) and engineering choices (low reliability) along with other things.
What happens to OCZ now depends on the completion of the Toshiba deal. Even if Toshiba completes the purchase of OCZ's assets, I doubt we'll see the OCZ brand anymore. OCZ's brand image took a hit with the low reliability, so I doubt Toshiba will see the OCZ brand adding any value to its products. I do hope that the deal goes through because OCZ's Indilinx Barefoot 3 platform has a lot of potential and it would be lamentable to see all that hard work to be flushed down the toilet.
Source: Nasdaq
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menting - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
like Guspaz said, OCZ didn't make any flash.Jun91 - Thursday, December 5, 2013 - link
If you are aware of their's financial situation, OCZ had struggle for a very, very long time.It is, finally.
Bob Todd - Thursday, November 28, 2013 - link
Ahh crap, I never got around to the 3rd RMA for the Agility 4 that's been sitting in my desk for months. Guess I need to do that pronto. And a ton of people in the comments here called it in several articles with some astute observations, like the absurd number of OCZ refurb deals Newegg has been offering for weeks now.Rocket321 - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
bummer, I remember when the 1st SSD's were having those terrible "studder" issues with random writes, OCZ was the company that actually responded to and worked with Anandtech to figure out the cause of the problems. This kind of partnership is not oft found in corporate america. I hope their employees are not out of a job, they have some great talent there.semo - Sunday, December 1, 2013 - link
Hold on a minute. This is not what happened. Ryan/OCZ tried to burry the issue which is what they later did again with the Vertex 2 25nm fiasco. Here's what happened when Anandtech discovered the "studder""This is Ryan Petersen:
He’s the CEO of OCZ Technology. He wasn’t too happy after my Intel X25-M SSD review.
Although that review was about the X25-M, it addressed a major shortcoming with a number of other SSDs in the market - the most popular at the time being OCZ’s Core line.
The problem with the Core line was that although they were competitively priced, they had a major performance issue: small file write latency. The problem manifested itself in system-wide stuttering during disk intensive multitasking. It wouldn’t take a lot to make those drives stutter, and until that article went live, everyone assumed that the problem was Windows, the disk controller, or something else.
I placed the blame on the drives and Ryan wasn’t all too happy."
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738/18
OCZ can not go away soon enough. It is Intel that made SSDs what they are now (both brought down price, increased IO and reliability with their first offering)
LtGoonRush - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
Ding dong the witch is dead. OCZ's decision to pair Sandforce controllers with garbage flash memory is primarily responsible for the unjustified bad reputation Sandforce drives have in some communities. (Yeah Sandforce's firmware should have handled the high error rate better, but you shouldn't make SSDs with known-defective NAND.)Guspaz - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
Intel's Sandforce drives have a perfectly good reliability record, and Apple has been using Sandforce controllers in their notebooks for some time now without any major complaints.Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
Actually the Toshiba's SandForce based drives that Apple has used have had major issues and Apple has even announced a replacement program:http://www.apple.com/support/macbookair-flashdrive...
LtGoonRush - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
Those are also drives that shipped with RAISE error correction disabled. I think the idea that RAISE wasn't required for consumer drives was put to bed quite some time ago.LtGoonRush - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
I feel like I should defend this a bit. Pointing out that Apple/Toshiba shipped Sandforce drives that were recalled was good criticism, and in theory the built-in ECC should be able to handle the error rates of good quality NAND without needing RAISE. There's also no evidence that RAISE would have helped in any way with the issues Apple/Toshiba SSDs experienced. However, I think it's telling that every other NAND manufacturer (Intel and SanDisk) and the brands that position for quality (Corsair, Mushkin) shipped ONLY drives with RAISE enabled. The companies shipping drives with RAISE disabled were largely new or fly-by-nights, with some big low-end brands (Kingston, ADATA)...and Apple/Toshiba. I doubt this was the only choice they made that affected the reliability of these devices.