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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mapesdhs - Saturday, November 30, 2013 - link
It's funny how peoples' experiences vary. I have more than thirty OCZ SSDs, not
a single issue with any of them so far (ranges from 60GB V2E to vector 256GB
and Vertex4 512GB, all sorts inbetween, including a dozen MAX IOPS 120s).
Oddly enough, the only OCZ product I bought which I didn't like was a PSU,
ever since which I've stuck to Thermaltake Toughpower.
As someone said earlier though, back in the DDR2 days I had some OCZ 800MHz
kits and they worked very well.
To me it's sad. Their early policies were obviously not good as regards product
reliability, but I think they learned from that and since then the models from the
Vertex4 onwards have been good. I have several Vectors, V4s, etc. What it
really means now is less competition, which is a real shame given the equivalent
state of affairs elsewhere in the world of PC components.
Ian.
zyky - Saturday, November 30, 2013 - link
I currently own and use multiple OCZ SSDs, DIMMs, power supplies, and even used niche market items like the DDR-Booster and haven't had a single issue with them. It was sad seeing them ditch memory production when being one of the top vendors for high speed RAM. Once they went from being the premier SandForce vendor who had special access to firmware to using Marvell and Indilinx IP, my love affair pretty much ended. Unless other vendors start producing controllers with write amplification less than one, I'll only ever buy SandForce based drives, performance be damned. Thus, I certainly had no plans of supporting OCZ much in the future.semo - Sunday, December 1, 2013 - link
"It's sad to see OCZ going because they've been one of the pioneers in the consumer SSD industry." Not true. OCZ Core was a terrible product. We now know it was Jmicron at fault but OCZ weren't trying to fix anything. Intel's X25M was the game changer and forced SSD makers to stop releasing overpriced crap. I still remember OCZ trying to sell Vertex 1s for the same price as X25Ms. Bunch greedy idiotsdananski - Sunday, December 1, 2013 - link
That's quite sad. I've liked my OCZ products (even the ones that have had firmware bugs) but I especially liked reading about what the company were up to. As a smaller company they were able to keep changing their way of doing things to try to keep ahead. From this news, I suppose taking those risks hasn't always paid off.My DDR2 Reapers are still going strong after all this time.
rrinker - Wednesday, December 4, 2013 - link
Never used anything OCZ except memory, it always worked - and it still working several years later, int he builds I used it in. But I don't try any extreme overclocks, especially with memory. In fact, of the last 5 systems I built, only the most current one has RAM from someone else, only because the 16GB kit I got was cheaper from someone other than OCZ at the time. One stored away, one is my server which has been on 24/7 for 3 years now, one is my previous desktop which is used regularly, and the other is an Atom box runnign Linux which controls my model railroad, and is used infrequently, lets of power on/off cycles.After seeing the reviews here, I wasn;t about to buy an OCZ SSD. The Kingstons in two of my older computers plus the Samsung in my most recent have been extremely reliable. The only OCZ Flash anything I have are a couple of 4GB USB sticks that came as promos, one with the RAM and one I think came with a power supply. They too work fine
rrinker - Wednesday, December 4, 2013 - link
Also isn't it ironic, the banner ad at the top of the page while posting this is for a Vector 150....soccerplayer88 - Monday, December 9, 2013 - link
Too bad. I've got two OCZ Vertex3 120GB SSD's in a RAID0.Not a single problem for the past 2-3 years. Perhaps I was one of the lucky ones.
Laphaswiff - Monday, December 9, 2013 - link
Ἑρμοκράτης ὁ Συρακοσίων στρατηγός, οὗτος ὁ νικήσας Ἀθηναίους, εἶχε θυγατέρα Καλλιρόην τοὔνομα, θαυμαστόν τι χρῆμα παρθένου καὶ ἄγαλμα τῆς ὅλης Σικελίας. (1,1,2) ἦν γὰρ τὸ κάλλος οὐκ ἀνθρώπινον ἀλλὰ θεῖον, οὐδὲ Νηρηίδος ἢ Νύμφης τῶν ὀρειῶν ἀλλ' αὐτῆς Ἀφροδίτης Παρθένου. φήμη δὲ τοῦ παραδόξου θεάματος πανταχοῦ διέτρεχε καὶ μνηστῆρες κατέρρεον εἰς Συρακούσας, δυνάσται τε καὶ παῖδες τυράννων, οὐκ ἐκ Σικελίας μόνον, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐξ Ἰταλίας καὶ Ἠπείρου καὶ ἐθνῶν τῶν ἐν ἠπείρῳ. (1,1,3) ὁ δὲ Ἔρως ζεῦγος ἴδιον ἠθέλησε συμπλέξαι. Χαιρέας γάρ τις ἦν μειράκιον εὔμορφον, πάντων ὑπερέχον, οἷον Ἀχιλλέα καὶ Νιρέα καὶ Ἱππόλυτον καὶ Ἀλκιβιάδην πλάσται τε καὶ γραφεῖς ἀποδεικνύουσι, πατρὸς Ἀρίστωνος τὰ δεύτερα ἐν Συρακούσαις μετὰ Ἑρμοκράτην φερομένου. καί τις ἦν ἐν αὐτοῖς πολιτικὸς φθόνος ὥστε θᾶττον ἂν πᾶσιν ἢ ἀλλήλοις ἐκήδευσαν. (1,1,4) φιλόνεικος δέ ἐστιν ὁ Ἔρως καὶ χαίρει τοῖς παραδόξοις κατορθώμασιν· ἐζήτησε δὲ τοιόνδε τὸν καιρόν.