OCZ May Be On Its Last Legs

itwbennett writes "OCZ, one of the first commercial solid-state drive (SSD) makers has been blaming a shortage of NAND for its woes for some time now, but things have taken a precipitous turn for the worse: 'For its second fiscal quarter ended August 31, 2013, revenue was $33.5 million, a huge drop compared to revenue of $55.3 million for the first quarter of 2013 and revenue of $88.6 million for the second quarter of 2012. The net loss for this quarter was massive, $26 million, a doubling of the $13.1 million loss in the same quarter last year.' The company has burned through cash, its stock collapsed, and now so have sales. Meanwhile, other SSD makers are doing well. So what is happening here?"

Rebates

[apcullen]

They also used rebates to make their products seem $20 less expensive. There's a new rebate every week, and the rebate expires after a week. So you must file for your rebate the day you purchase, or by the time to go to collect the rebate yours will have expired.Got burned by this once. Didn't turn me into a repeat customer.

Vertex 2

[Rob Hostetter]

I bought a vertex 2 when it first came out due to its incredible speed for use in a server. After a year the server slowed down to way slower than hard drives. I researched it to find out, that they built in a limiter, if you exceed the IO that will burn through the drive before the warranty ended they slowed down the drive so that it would last. This made the drive useless to me. I had to replace it with an intel drive. I will never buy another OCZ SSD.

Reputation killing them

[abigsmurf]

Their failure rates were abysmal. A drive failing after 6 months is appalling. A drive failing suddenly after 6 months, suddenly with zero warning is completely unacceptable. Even if you have a backup routine, that's probably going to result in days of lost work, plus the need to re-install everything on another drive whilst you RMA it.

To add financial injury to insult, in the UK, RMA'ing an OCZ drive requires you to send it insured and recorded to the Netherlands. It cost me around £20 to send it off. I'm certainly never going to buy OCZ again. The 15% return rate for OCZ drives that failed after 1 year is unacceptable and frankly, should've been grounds for a recall.

Re:Tiniest violin

[girlintraining]

They also replaced the 34nm Vertex 2 drives with 25nm drives, lowering speed and space without changing the model number. They are scum.

Worse than scum. I hope they die in a fire. My OCZ drive has started locking up and showing bad sectors and they won't RMA it. They just say "Oh, unplug it, wait an hour, then wipe it." ... Yeah. The bad sectors disappear... until the first time the OS tries to write to those sectors. Their warranties can't even be used as toilet paper.

They didn't "bet on higher performance", they bet on shit construction, no quality control... hell, you can't even update the firmware using the tools they provide on the website unless you plug a second drive in and install an OS on it. Now yes, many of us geeky types can install a mini-XP or Windows 7 on a flash drive and be on our merry, but really... how can you expect Joe Power Gamer to do something like that? Simple: You can't.

It's not just the poor quality and construction of the drives that fucked them, but a complete and utter disregard for any level of customer service. No, I recant on my last statement... death by fire is too good for them. Let us create a new 'ocz' internet meme to immortalize this level of fail. >.

Re:Vertex 2

[edmudama]

In fairness, most vendors have this option.

You can either choose a 3/5 year warranty, and the drive will slow itself down to guarantee it lasts.

Or, you can choose to go by the "gas gauge" and your warranty may expire after 8 months or whatever of full-speed IO.

When you buy server-grade drives, they usually sell you a gas gauge model.

Re:Full of BS

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

My own experience with OCZ drives is a 100% failure rate and no support to speak of.

Far more significantly, though, my supplier's experience with them was that they saw such a high proportion of returns that they dropped the brand entirely. My anecdotal data point might have been down to bad luck, but the odds of the pattern my supplier told me about being down to luck would be tiny.

Re: Tiniest violin

[r_jensen11]

My favorite Dell customer support experience had to do with the floppy disk drive getting jammed. We tried pushing the eject button, but couldn't depress the button to release the floppy. Despite the fact that this was clearly a mechanical issue that should still be able to work when the drive is unplugged from the computer (and hence not have any power), the rep still insisted that we:
1) Restart the computer & report what errors were showing up in the Add/Remove Hardware window (hint: there was no reported error)
2) Uninstall & reinstall the drivers for said floppy drive
3) Unplug the computer from the wall, wait n seconds, plug computer back into the wall, then repeat #1 & #2

After going through this process, the rep concluded "Well, I don't have a clue what could possibly be wrong! I suggest you mail the drive back to us so our specialists can take a look at it and give you a replacement (which is what we immediately asked for when we finally got in contact with a person.) here is your RMA number...."

And this was when we called their customer support for enterprises!

Avoid all brands with "4 GAMERZZZ!!11" marketing

[SD-Arcadia]

This goes for OCZ, Corsair, Razer... They bet on male teenager gamer hype, not quality.