I wonder why Toshiba wants OCZ given Toshiba is already making SSD themselves and been doing fine. As someone has already mentioned down below, OCZ to me was a RAM company before they sold first SSD. Is Toshiba trying to compete in the SSD market too? I thought Samsung and Intel were pretty much the winners in this market. If OCZ exist because of quality, what can Toshiba can get out of the acquisition? The factory? The machines? The top engineers?
Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy
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Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy
#32In the early SSD days, I only heard two adjectives to describe OCZ drives - "fastest" and "unstable". It was inevitable the latter would catch up to them.
When I bought my SSD, I narrowed in on Intel very quickly. I don't trust "gamer" / benchmark-focused brands at all for this kind of product.
Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy
#33The 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.
Well that would totally do it. High failure rate on a low margin product is nearly as bad as having too much inventory because the effect is very much the same. Example:
Say you make $10 profit on a $100 product. For every replacement product, you need to sell 9 more to make your money back on the 1 failure. So, a 10% failure rate means you are basically selling the other 90% just to break even and try to stay in business.
I don't know about OCZ's margins or their failure rate, but with prices squeezing downward, I'd imagine they found themselves in a situation where they maybe had a high enough margin initially that the failure rate wasn't high enough to sink them or the failures didn't occur early enough to burn through the overall margin right away. That's not a sustainable business and the only option is to get people to float you a loan that is maybe big enough to buy time to fix the quality problems if possible. In the event that it's unfixable, no amount of money can save an upside down business model.
Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy
#34This is upsetting as we are moving towards a tech world filled with only a few big brands. Will we only be able to buy SSDs from Intel or Samsung in the future? Time will tell, but I am upset that the small guy can't compete in this space anymore.
I would definitely expect the market to vertically integrate so that most SSDs are made by NAND vendors. That would mostly leave us with Samsung, Intel, Micron, and Toshiba.
But by the time the SSD market becomes totally boring PCM may arrive...
Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy
#35I wonder why Toshiba wants OCZ given Toshiba is already making SSD themselves and been doing fine. As someone has already mentioned down below, OCZ to me was a RAM company before they sold first SSD. Is Toshiba trying to compete in the SSD market too? I thought Samsung and Intel were pretty much the winners in this market. If OCZ exist because of quality, what can Toshiba can get out of the acquisition? The factory?…
I assume just the branding, really. They did very well with the gamer market.
Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy
#36Violin Memory is about to go under as well, less than a year after they IPOed...
Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy
#37I have an OCZ disk.... in the bottom of a drawer, failed.
Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy
#38I have an OCZ disk.... in the bottom of a drawer, failed.
Same, all it's good for is being a paperweight now.
Their firmware is ridiculously buggy. I was using one in my primary laptop, and got hit by the bug where, if you sleep the drive too many times, the whole drive fails. Total unrecoverable data loss.
Their forums are full of stories like that.
Next drive, went Intel, haven't looked back since.
Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy
#39I wonder why Toshiba wants OCZ given Toshiba is already making SSD themselves and been doing fine. As someone has already mentioned down below, OCZ to me was a RAM company before they sold first SSD. Is Toshiba trying to compete in the SSD market too? I thought Samsung and Intel were pretty much the winners in this market. If OCZ exist because of quality, what can Toshiba can get out of the acquisition? The factory?…
I assume just the branding, really. They did very well with the gamer market.
/Did/ well. It's virtually known by everyone in the know that OCZ is synonymous for being unreliable.
Re: Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy
#40I have OCZ drives in a couple of my machines, all of which are at least a year old. I'd heard bad things about OCZ, but I didn't realize their reputation was that shot. I'm wondering if I should replace my drives, or if the bathtub curve is in full effect here and I've dodged a bullet...
With regards to other brands, I spent some time at the startup where I used to work putting together manufacturing PCs meant for programming serial numbers into devices, assembled from Intel SSDs, cheap Foxconn nettop computers, and the cheapest sticks of RAM we could find. I must have put together around 15 or so of those machines, and although a lot of them failed due to factory conditions/rough handling/power cuts, I don't think any of the Intel drives ever broke down.