

Inside OCZ's Factory: How SSDs Are Made - ismavis
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9218/ocz-fab-tour

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scurvy
I love how Kristian opens up with a flow chart of OCZ's design process. Every
OCZ product fails in step 4 -- or seems to jump from 2 to 5.

I read the title of the article as "How SSDs are Made (Poorly)". This was a
bad acquisition for Toshiba.

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jotm
They forgot to include the "Testing unfinished products on client PCs" phase
:-)

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cyphunk
And the history of black/grey market meandering. I remember watching a
discussion on their official support forum from users requesting help on
broken drives purchased new in box off of ebay. OCZ didn't even bother to
check serial numbers for legitimacy they just made a blanket rule against
anything purchased on ebay. I'd have chalked this up to typical support
laziness but after (respectfully) posting suggestions for various methods that
can be used to distinguish clones from legit they deleted the whole thread.
Just a horribly shoddy company.

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Mithaldu
It's weird that OCZ tries to somehow salvage itself from the reputation of a
company that knowingly produces unreliable hardware and knowingly lies to
customers.

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yuhong
I think they were eventually acquired by Toshiba.

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flurpitude
I had three OCZ SSDs - a Vertex 2 and two Vertex 3s. One lasted a month and a
half; the others lasted a month. It's surprising that Toshiba would want to be
associated with this brand.

~~~
wtallis
OCZ basically did the beta testing for SandForce, and paid the price with
their eventual bankruptcy. But by then they had acquired Indilinx to provide
an in-house alternative to SandForce controllers, and that's a significant
chunk of what Toshiba was interested in buying. Winning in the SSD market
seems to require making your own controller and/or flash, and there's only one
good source for buying a good high-performance controller on the open market
(Marvell).

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ak217
Few companies have poisoned the well as thoroughly as OCZ has, by treating
their customers and investors as utterly disposable. There are a lot of people
out there who won't forget what they did. Toshiba would do well to retire the
brand, dissolve the org and integrate the assets fully.

~~~
MCRed
I think they will. They shipped "Hitachi" drives for awhile, but now are
branding them Toshiba. I think the same thing will happen with OCZ-- they
introduce a Toshiba branded drive, that's exactly the same as the OCZ and over
time make these more available than the OCZ branded ones until the market has
transitioned.

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mbell
Pretty empty article TBH. This is not only standard, but very simple pick and
place assembly that any CM can do.

Most of what goes into 'Making an SSD' is the ASIC and firmware design on the
controller. The actual assembly is incredibly mundane from there.

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scurvy
I'm surprised that they're looking to replace some of the more mundane manual
tasks with automation. Labor is a lot cheaper than machines in China.

I somehow doubt that putting stickers on a SSD is the bottleneck in their
production facility.

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bni
Will never, ever buy anything branded with OCZ. This company nearly poisoned
the SSD market.

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aphrax
I completely missed this - what did they do?

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wtallis
They rushed several products to market, got tons of market share because they
were setting performance records, and then they got basically all of the
backlash when the bugs in the controllers and firmware started causing lots of
drive failures. They also got in a bit of trouble once or twice for swapping
out components with cheaper stuff that didn't perform as well. On the other
hand, they were doing a great job of pushing the price/performance frontier so
all the more reliable and more expensive drives that eventually made it to
market still had to at least match OCZ's performance. That led to the very
surprising situation where _Intel_ basically withdrew from the consumer SSD
market for a few years because they couldn't keep pace without sacrificing
their QA standards.

