Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy
arstechnica.com
Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy
1–10 of 92 posts
Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy
#2Some of this writing had been on the walls:
If you're a fan of conference calls, then you probably already know that OCZ isn't in the same rosy position it has been in years past. Fortunately, its enterprise-oriented offerings are really helping the company's bottom line. But the situation is darker on the desktop. It's still in the position of needing to source NAND from the fabs manufacturing it, which means it's paying more for the flash it uses and perhaps unable to ship as many units as it'd like.
But again, if you listen to earnings calls, you might already know all of this.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/vector-150-ssd-review,36...
Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy
#3The one thing that will kill a hardware company much faster than a software company is managing supply chain and inventory costs. I don't know the full backstory of OCZ other than seeing how the SSD segment of the storage industry has gone and the prices have obviously gone a lot lower and are more competitive. Depending on how OCZ managed their production, it would be very easy to be left holding the bag on millions of dollars of inventory. Unless you have billions in the bank, that's enough to sink a company every time.
Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy
#4However, a long string of failures across several of its product lines (most notably the high-performance Vertex family) took a lot of the shine off of OCZ's name
Although only anecdotal, we ditched OCZ at my last company because of their high failure rate; never risked going back. No such issue with Intel or others
Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy
#5I 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.
Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy
#6> Once-great
They were never great.
They lied to their customers by selling hardware under the same name as previously produced hardware with cheaper components and lesser specs.
They built hardware that was simply off-spec, an example being drives where the connectors were an entire millimeter shifted, such that when installed in certain machines the connectors literally could not make contact with the corresponding metal.
They built drives with extreme speeds while entirely sacrificing longevity and reliability.
At best they had a great marketing department that made it possible for them to peddle their crap to the public for so long.
I'm glad to see them go.
Edit:
For those who must have numbers, return statistics:
http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=2&h...
Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy
#7> Once-great They were never great. They lied to their customers by selling hardware under the same name as previously produced hardware with cheaper components and lesser specs. They built hardware that was simply off-spec, an example being drives where the connectors were an entire millimeter shifted, such that when installed in certain machines the connectors literally could not make contact with the corresponding…
I'm not sure it's so bad. I bought my OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 2.5 years ago, it's been great and I'm still happy with it. They also have had many good reviews.
Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy
#8The one thing that will kill a hardware company much faster than a software company is managing supply chain and inventory costs. I don't know the full backstory of OCZ other than seeing how the SSD segment of the storage industry has gone and the prices have obviously gone a lot lower and are more competitive. Depending on how OCZ managed their production, it would be very easy to be left holding the bag on millions…
They had a high rate of warranty replacements for several years...so much so that it cost the founder and CEO his job.
It's pretty hard to make money when you have to provide two products for the price of one. It went on for so long that it was scary.
Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy
#9Not surprised, their installation instructions should have had "update firmware" as a step...
Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy
#10> Once-great They were never great. They lied to their customers by selling hardware under the same name as previously produced hardware with cheaper components and lesser specs. They built hardware that was simply off-spec, an example being drives where the connectors were an entire millimeter shifted, such that when installed in certain machines the connectors literally could not make contact with the corresponding…
I'm not sure it's so bad. I bought my OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 2.5 years ago, it's been great and I'm still happy with it. They also have had many good reviews.
Same here. Swapped out the stock drive in my MPB with a Vertex 3 in April 2011, and its been rock solid ever since with everyday-use.