SSD Manufacturer OCZ Preparing For Bankruptcy

JDG1980 writes "OCZ, a manufacturer of solid-state drives, says it will file for bankruptcy. This move is being forced by Hercules Technology Growth Capital, which had lent $30 million to OCZ under terms that were later breached. The most likely outcome of this bankruptcy is that OCZ's assets (including the Indilinx controller IP) will be purchased by Toshiba. If this deal falls through, the company will be liquidated. No word yet on what a Toshiba purchase would mean in terms of warranty support for OCZ's notoriously unreliable drives."

STILL not accurate and STILL misquoted

[slashmydots]

Their drives don't have a high failure rate! They're not unreliable! It was all based on a single study that showed a high return rate. That was because the morons at OCZ released them with beta level firmware that made the first batch of 3 and 4 series drives not be recognized 100% of the time by many BIOSes. I built over 50 computers with OCZ SSDs and about 40 of them had to be flashed to the latest firmware before they operated correctly. After that, zero out of 50 came back in 2 years so that means zero failed. They used 9000 write cycle flash memory instead of, for example, Kingston HyperX 3K's 3000 rating. They had an internal, firmware-based TRIM style sweep in case your OS didn't support TRIM too. They were one of the best drives out there.
Unfortunately, I hate them because they decided to "stop being competitive" and single handedly drove up the price of SSDs basically by price fixing. Their drives went up 50% in price overnight. That was such bullshit, they deserve bankruptcy.

How many?

[yoshi_mon]

I use Intel SSDs, period. I'm not a fan of Intel at all and really want AMD to succeed such that we have some compititon in the marketplace. But when it comes to SSDs Intel holds the best non-failure rate that I've found.

I've paid more but on my own personal rigs as well as every client's, I've not had any failure. And they are fast too. I mean duh, they are SSDs!

But whenever I saw OCZ I saw marketing. I mean I guess they had some good drives using reliable chips and good controllers but from what I saw it was all about the marketing. Which leads me to my post's question. How many engineers did they really have at that company that worked on things vs the amount of MBA marketeers.

In short I never saw OCZ as a serious company. They were not a Corsair or some other startup that had real desires to make good hardware. Rather they had a lot of marketing push and very little else. The level of return on their SSDs was super high and once I saw that it told me all I needed to know about them. Anyone can make some RAM and slap on some crafted aluminum heatsink onto it. Not everyone can make a SSD.

Re:STILL not accurate and STILL misquoted

[iCEBaLM]

But they're not incorrectly working 80% of the time, they're incorrectly working once, fixed, and then they work for the rest of the products life.

Re:Warranties

[PopeRatzo]

The warranty is a legal obligation, and one a company would have a responsibility to fulfill, and if the company is bought by someone else, it becomes their obligation.

Sure, if you wanna face an arbitration panel hand-picked from corporate lawyers.

Anyway, it doesn't say the drives will be purchased by Toshiba, just the controller technology.

When a company goes bankrupt and another company picks its bones, the first thing to go by the wayside are things like pensions, guarantees, municipal contracts and similar agreements. Toshiba's lawyers will get them out of those warranties faster than a drunk sophomore gets out of a prom dress.

Re:Warranties

[ArbitraryName]

Incorrect. Warranties are considered unsecured liabilities. Once the company files for (Chapter 7) bankruptcy they stop honoring warranties just like they stop paying debts. The company's assets are sold and creditors are repaid in a set order. Unsecured debts are absolutely dead last and are generally never paid (after all, if they could have paid them they wouldn't likely be filing bankruptcy. Assets sold in bankruptcy are free from any liens or claims. Toshiba would be under no obligation to warranty any OCZ products, as they would have simply purchased their assets.

Re:Warranties

[FatdogHaiku]

Unless Toshiba actually agrees to assume the liabilities of OCZ (and WHY would they do that?) then no, the obligation to cover old products is not transferred. If a building contractor goes belly up and you buy his assets (materials, vehicles, tools & equipment, unsold inventory, client lists, etc.) that does not make you responsible for work he did in the past. Now, "if" you keep the brand alive you would most likely have to stand behind previous commitments, but again WHY would Toshiba do that? Toshiba is solid and OCZ is on fire. Toshiba will gain new IP and physical plants and resources and OCZ will be ash. Shareholders will get pennies on the dollar, customers will get screwed without lube. For warranty inquiries, contact the bankruptcy trustee.

Re:STILL not accurate and STILL misquoted

[ArbitraryName]

The study [behardware.com] you are talking about was based on returns from between six months and one year after purchase. It does not cover DOA parts. Your theory is mistaken.

Re:STILL not accurate and STILL misquoted

[cyberjock1980]

I disagree. I've had several friends(at least 4 off the top of my head) that have bought OCZs. None of them lasted 6 months without having to do an RMA. One friend had 3 RMAs in about 9 months. Despite having 3 months left on his warranty he went with Intel(because of my recommendation) because it wasn't worth his time to continually have to restore from backup to a temporary drive while he does the RMA.

Even in forums I hear people talk about failed OCZ drives regularly. Sure, there's the occasional Samsung and Intel in there. But OCZ sure is mentioned FAR more frequently than the other brands. I'm not convinced that their market share is 90% to offset the number of users that complain about failed disks.

Personally, I don't care if they used 1-million write cycle flash memory instead of Kingston's 3000 cycle memory. If every drive I've had second hand experience with has to be RMAd in less than 6 months something is horribly wrong and I'd be avoiding that product or brand. There's alot more to a drive than just the number of write cycles. Poorly written SSD firmware could easily make a drive with a very long lifespan be abnormally short due to write amplification. So feel free to keep talking numbers, cause the comparision of write cycles is only a very small part of what makes an SSD reliable(or not).

In my opinion OCZ has undoubtedly made some bad models. Are they all bad? Probably not. But, it doesn't take much to earn a reputation for being crappy. And once you've earned that reputation it's going to take some serious convincing to get people to spend money on your product again. In my case, they'd have to give me a drive for free to prove that they really are just as reliable as the 3 Intel drives I've had in my 3 main machines that haven't failed in 3 years+ of use.

Re:...and

[DeSigna]

Intel are high-midrange (in terms of quality and performance) in both enterprise and desktop flash storage. Samsung has a very strong presence across the board due to reputation, very good performance (substantially better than Intel in production gear) and many of the vendor-branded enterprise drives (HP, NetApp, EMC, etc) have Samsung internals.

When I bought my current desktop's SSD (Samsung 840 Pro), the only other vendor with a drive even remotely close in performance was OCZ. Googling for "OCZ Vertex4 problems" quickly put that possibility to rest. At the time, Intel wasn't looking like they were bothering to keep up with performance on the desktop, but they're always been reasonable quality-wise.

Re:...and

[Dogtanian]

Is the problem in general with Sandforce or with the way that OCZ used their controllers? From this very informative Slashdot post by Miamicanes [slashdot.org]:-

For example, Sandforce's engineers came up with an ugly, performance-killing hack that allowed the drive to avoid corruption if it were powered-down mid-write so they could officially claim that the ultracapacitor (*) was "optional" in "cost-sensitive applications". OCZ built drives without the ultracap, then had Sandforce furnish them with firmware that DISABLED THAT SAFETY MEASURE to avoid killing their drives' write performance in benchmarks.

To be blunt, Sandforce probably deserve to be tarred with the OCZ brush since they were actively complicit in that, but the fact remains that the problem here was caused by overriding the safety measures built into the controller rather than the controller itself...?

That said, the association has still put me off buying any Sandforce-based SSD.

(*) Which I assume was intended to provide enough power to complete the write normally. I'm also assuming that this "ultracapacitor" must be significantly more expensive than the bog standard types we're familiar with, whose cost would be negligible.

Re:...and

[Dogtanian]

Fuck you. My OCZ Vertex 4 works like a dream.

Was that the type of dream where you're in an exam and someone comes in and steals your pencils and you chase him down the corridor, but the corridor is the one from the office where you had your first job except that when you leave at one end you realised you've re-entered at the other side and there's no exit and the person who stole your pencils is now chasing *you* and you run and run and run, then you realise that the person chasing you looks like Guy Pearce when he used to play Mike in Neighbours and by waving your hands you get your pencils back, but you only have 15 minutes of the two hour exam left and it's for Portuguese Literature which you never studied in your life and also your OCZ SSD drive keeps failing and corrupting your data?

Yeah, I guess one could say it works like a dream. (^_^)