
Once-great SSD manufacturer OCZ filing for bankruptcy - shawndumas
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/11/once-great-ssd-manufacturer-ocz-filing-for-bankruptcy/
======
Mithaldu
> 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...](http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=2&hl=it&ie=UTF8&prev=_t&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=fr&tl=en&u=http://www.hardware.fr/articles/862-7/ssd.html&usg=ALkJrhjYW5hePOLf3fELOQmp2PsCCvVSRg)

[http://www.hardware.fr/articles/911-7/ssd.html](http://www.hardware.fr/articles/911-7/ssd.html)

~~~
jkbyc
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.

~~~
whitewhim
I've had to have them replace my OCZ Vertex 2 three times.

~~~
scotty79
Both of my OCZ Vertex 2 died on me. I was able to bring one back from the dead
with firmware upgrade and repartitioning and reformatting. Second one serves
as interesting although bit thick coaster. Couldn't return them to
manufacturer because they were not bought from one of their listed retailers.
I couldn't return them to the shop either because they worked few years before
any trouble happened.

------
kabdib
In the "hardware junkies" mailing list at work (Microsoft) the OCZ drives were
a periodic source of derision.

"My OCZ drive failed..." / "I'm on my fourth RMA, what should I do?"

"Real junkies buy Intel." (Or Samsung). And they don't buy TLC flash, either.

~~~
ek
I am pleased that Microsoft has a list called "hardware junkies" :). I'd
definitely be on it if I were there.

Nice to know they agree with the rest of us that Samsung is the way to go
nowadays, too.

~~~
tanzam75
On Newegg, OCZ SSDs would consistently have a larger number of 1-star reviews
than other drives. Whereas Intel and Samsung drives would consistently have a
smaller number of 1-star reviews.

This was one situation where you actually got what you paid for. Yeah, you do
pay more for Intel and Samsung -- but that pays for the QA engineers. If you
bought OCZ, then you got to be your own QA engineer.

------
gogeek
We had about 40 OCZ drives (Vertex 2/3/3 Max IOPS) and 6 of them failed. Our 8
Vertex 3 Max IOPS were in RAID 5 for a huge calculations which didn't require
reliability but wrote a lot of data and therfore we tried to save time with
this experimental RAID. The RAID was fine for about a couple of month and
seeing almost 3 GB/s throughput was mindblowing. But suddenly we we saw drives
randomly failing. But the drives did not completly fail, we were able to
rebuild the RAID with the same hard drive. We did that a couple of times until
we thought it was too much hassle and used the drives somewhere else. Now we
are buying Crucial M4s and they are totally fine. In the first place a hard
drive must be reliable.

~~~
danielvinson
This was a firmware bug originating from the Sandforce firmware which the
releases were based on - I think this one was completely fixed at least 8
months ago.

------
highace
I 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.

~~~
fletchowns
They are _notorious_ for pushing out low quality products. You really should
be a more informed consumer before you buy stuff, it's not like it takes a
long time to research this kind of stuff.

~~~
vacri
At the consumer level, it is quite difficult to research a lot of this kind of
thing. There is so much contradictory information out there on almost every
product, and trying to ferret out the right information can be a gruelling
task.

Go to a few review sites, have the reviews say "OCZ looks fast and good", go
away with a good impression. You have to look elsewhere - on forums and the
like, all of which are highly variant in quality - to get information about
long-term performance. It's compounded when you have a new player or new
product lines. Here in this very thread, it has several people saying "OCZ is
great".

~~~
tanzam75
Well, Newegg at least makes it possible to distinguish an OCZ from an
Intel/Samsung. When an OCZ drive has 3-stars and 30% of them are 1-star
reviews, then you know something is wrong, compared to the Intel drive that
has 4.5-stars with only 5% being 1-star.

It's in the finer gradations that it gets murky. Is a 4.5-star drive really
better than a 4-star drive?

------
austinz
I 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.

~~~
dpark
> _I 'm wondering if I should replace my drives, or if the bathtub curve is in
> full effect here\_

You should back them up, but you should do that regardless of the drive
manufacturer. Replacing working drives won't likely gain you anything except a
lighter wallet. As you mentioned, you're "in the bathtub" now, and a newer
drive is probably more likely to fail. Maintain good backups and replace the
drives if/when they fail.

------
brownbat
Some 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...](http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/vector-150-ssd-
review,3664.html)

------
volvelle
_However, 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

------
kalleboo
In 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.

~~~
frou_dh
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.

~~~
eDavis698
Definately, Intel fabs their own NAND devices in the USA! The 320/520 also has
Intel's own controller in it. I have a 320 & a 330 striped in my laptop (SATA
II). The have been working flawlessly for over a year, nearly two for the 320.

After my issues with Western Digital, Asus, OCZ (power supplies) and EVGA
(mobo/gfx) I will never trust "gaming" hardware again. Overpriced junk. [OTOH
all my Intel, MSI, and AMD hardware is still working after 6+ years in
service.]

~~~
lmz
The 520 is SandForce[1], not Intel's own controller. It looks like Intel has
given up on using their own controllers for their consumer SSDs, given that
the 330 is also SandForce. Their own next generation controller is in their DC
series SSDs marketed towards enterprise & datacenter usage.

[1]: [http://www.anandtech.com/show/5508/intel-ssd-520-review-
cher...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/5508/intel-ssd-520-review-cherryville-
brings-reliability-to-sandforce)

~~~
eDavis698
Thanks for the clarification, my memory was off. Link to Intel/Micron site:
[http://imflash.com/](http://imflash.com/)

------
programminggeek
The 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.

~~~
AmVess
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.

~~~
programminggeek
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.

------
yeukhon
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?

~~~
rsynnott
I assume just the branding, really. They did very well with the gamer market.

~~~
wcfields
/Did/ well. It's virtually known by everyone in the know that OCZ is
synonymous for being unreliable.

~~~
boyaka
Well now that Toshiba runs things that should be less of a problem.

------
J_Darnley
I remember them being something other than an SSD manufacturer. I've got a few
sticks of DDR memory from them. In fact I was surprised to see them producing
flash memory products lately (for a very long definition of lately).

------
mrbill
Not surprised, their installation instructions should have had "update
firmware" as a step...

~~~
AmVess
The first three steps were 1)hold breath 2)cross fingers 3)pray.

Always not a good thing when dealing with such a vital system component.

I hated flashing the things, since there was always a real possibility of
turning them into lightweight plastic bricks, and often the firmware was
needed to fix show-stopping bugs. so flashing wasn't optional.

------
bhauer
I have avoided them since I started buying SSDs because I associate their
brand with Sandforce controllers, and I associate Sandforce controllers with
drive failure.

Whether these associations are informed by and backed by data or not, they are
among the points that steered me into the arms of Intel and Samsung for my SSD
needs.

~~~
JohnBooty

      I associate their brand with Sandforce controllers, and I
      associate Sandforce controllers with drive failure.
    
      Whether these associations are informed by and backed 
      by data or not, they are among the points that steered me 
      into the arms of Intel and Samsung
    

Intel has been using Sandforce controllers for a while, starting with the 520
early in 2012. I believe all their products since then have used Sandforce
controllers - 330 and 335 definitely do. Source:
[http://www.storagereview.com/intel_ssd_520_review](http://www.storagereview.com/intel_ssd_520_review)
[http://www.anandtech.com/show/6388/intel-ssd-335-240gb-
revie...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/6388/intel-ssd-335-240gb-review) etc

All other things being equal (quality of NAND, workload, etc) the NAND on
Sandforce drives will last longer because of their write compression. Of
course, most drives will be replaced or retired before that point anyway.

I think Sandforce had a bit of a bad rap for a while because they were the go-
to controller for brands like OCZ who competed on price. Their actual silicon
is great. In the hands of a manufacturer like Intel (or even OWC - not to be
confused with OCZ) who puts quality and stability first, Sandforce controllers
really shine.

~~~
skrause
> _All other things being equal (quality of NAND, workload, etc) the NAND on
> Sandforce drives will last longer because of their write compression._

The write compression is the reason why I associate Sandforce with _" I'm
being punished for using full-disk encryption"_. I could never convince myself
to buy any drive with a controller where one of the main advertised
"advantages" was completely useless for my usecase.

------
chrismcband
I had a OCZ petrol drive that failed recently, it was just over a year old,
but have had a vertex drive in another macbook pro that's still alive after 2
years. I just try and back up regularly. I'm surprised at the bankruptcy but
they did have huge problems, their forums were inundated with issues.

------
chrisblackwell
This 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.

~~~
wmf
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...

------
wil421
I'm glad I stuck with Intel ssds even though they eventually switched to
SandForce I have drives with both controllers and they are both awesome. I
almost bought an OCZ but they were garbage especially now Samsung is a player.

------
anons2011
When I got my first SSD over a year ago, I bought a 250gb OCZ Agility 3 drive.
Not knowing about the very high drive failure rate. It died last week,
completely without warning.

Bought a Samsung SSD to replace it.

~~~
gambiting
I don't understand why in the world would you spend more money on a new drive
- if you only bought that drive a year ago you could have it replaced under
warranty. Even if it only works for another year, it's still infinitely
better(in my mind) than spending money on a new drive.

------
mankypro
I own a vertex 3, never had an issue with it going on 2 years. It is used in
an osx laptop that is used aggressively for devops work. Guess I got one of
the good ones...

------
jackmaney
A few years ago, I went through at least two different sets of faulty OCZ RAM
before exchanging for the vastly superior Corsair memory.

Good riddance.

------
broknbottle
good. I picked up a 30GB ssd on eBay that was NIB for like 30 bucks and it
failed while installing arch linux. I contacted the seller and he happily
refunded me. That was my first experience with OCZ as I have always used Intel
or Kingston SSD.

------
brosco45
Violin Memory is about to go under as well, less than a year after they
IPOed...

~~~
alexkus
Their IPO was two months ago yesterday. September 27th 2013.

~~~
brosco45
Yup, down 50% already

------
michaeldausmann
I have an OCZ disk.... in the bottom of a drawer, failed.

~~~
yskchu
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.

