Slashdot Mirror
OCZ May Be On Its Last Legs
itwbennett writes "OCZ, one of the first commercial solid-state drive (SSD) makers has been blaming a shortage of NAND for its woes for some time now, but things have taken a precipitous turn for the worse: 'For its second fiscal quarter ended August 31, 2013, revenue was $33.5 million, a huge drop compared to revenue of $55.3 million for the first quarter of 2013 and revenue of $88.6 million for the second quarter of 2012. The net loss for this quarter was massive, $26 million, a doubling of the $13.1 million loss in the same quarter last year.' The company has burned through cash, its stock collapsed, and now so have sales. Meanwhile, other SSD makers are doing well. So what is happening here?"
They burned too many customers with "enterprise" devices that'd fail almost immediately, then treating the customers like shit when they did.
They bet too heavily on high performance, while not maintaining the kind of behavior that would bring back the customers who want devices like that.
The reason Dell and HP can get away with burning customers is simple: there's always another person who needs a cheap laptop.
Not many people need a new PCIe SSD.
Good riddance.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Rightly or wrongly, they earned a reputation for selling unreliable drives. Last winter I saw quite a few deals on mass market websites that featured refurbished OCZ drives at cut-rate prices -- I suspect they had a return rate that was significantly higher than the industry average.
All niche market products suffer the same fate when expectations for broad market type growth are assumed.
End of discussion.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Shitty unreliable drives that are way over priced and they treat there customers like shit ... this was easily predictable
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
.... you have to expect this to happen.
Every product I've ever bought from them (AND the replacements!) has been either DOA or died in infancy. That's an SSD, and 2 separate memory purchases.
Granted, it's a small sample, but it fits with the overall market trend that is described.
They got on the SSD map for making the first marginally affordable SSDs, and they seemed to have gotten there by cutting more corners than was remotely reasonable.
I started upgrading all computers with ocz drives years ago because the speed difference despite the cost was unreal, and they had the highest benchmarks and great price points. I soon had to replace the all within a year due to failures or incompadability with some motherboards. I never went back to Ocz again and instead went for slower intel drives but they were much more reliable and comparable.
As your sig says, you're full of BS. I have seen no evidence that they had shitty enterprise devices nor that they treated them like shit when they attempted to return them. Care to back your position up?
Every single NAND manufacturer now has an in-house team building SSDs that frankly are good enough for most users across the board.
Why would any of them sell NAND to OCZ when they can build that same NAND into their own SSDs for 40% or more profit?
Small NAND controller technology companies without long-term supply agreements are dying, and OCZ won't be the first.
OCZ sacrificed long-term profit and potential for higher short-term profit. Lower the cost of production by using cheap/crappy parts. Spend money on marketing to increase sales. Increase the cost of the product to offset marketing costs. You get a crappy product with a larger profit margin and hope no one notices. That's not the business plan for long-term success. The problem is that that's the business plan share holders and CEOs like. It makes them look good now. Nobody wants to buy and hold a stock anymore. Make me a big profit now! It's one of the reasons our economy is stuttering. You can't sell shareholders the idea that your goal is a stable and modest growth. You gotta be explosive with growth every quarter!
I purchased their stock, that is all.
They also used rebates to make their products seem $20 less expensive. There's a new rebate every week, and the rebate expires after a week. So you must file for your rebate the day you purchase, or by the time to go to collect the rebate yours will have expired.Got burned by this once. Didn't turn me into a repeat customer.
I bought a vertex 2 when it first came out due to its incredible speed for use in a server. After a year the server slowed down to way slower than hard drives. I researched it to find out, that they built in a limiter, if you exceed the IO that will burn through the drive before the warranty ended they slowed down the drive so that it would last. This made the drive useless to me. I had to replace it with an intel drive. I will never buy another OCZ SSD.
Their failure rates were abysmal. A drive failing after 6 months is appalling. A drive failing suddenly after 6 months, suddenly with zero warning is completely unacceptable. Even if you have a backup routine, that's probably going to result in days of lost work, plus the need to re-install everything on another drive whilst you RMA it.
To add financial injury to insult, in the UK, RMA'ing an OCZ drive requires you to send it insured and recorded to the Netherlands. It cost me around £20 to send it off. I'm certainly never going to buy OCZ again. The 15% return rate for OCZ drives that failed after 1 year is unacceptable and frankly, should've been grounds for a recall.
Anecdotal evidence of course. But I had OCZ SSD fail on me twice during 2 year warranty. Second time they didn't have comparable drive to give me. So they offered to refund me 50$ for a drive that did cost me $200 2 years back. Managed to get back my original $200
While with old drives there was always a chance for repair. With SSD they said - ok, dead, we'll give you one, your data is gone. That might be another factor.
I have an OCZ Revodrive first gen 120GB and its never had a problem. I also have a Vertex 4 256GB thats been running solid since I got it. The only SSD I've ever had fail was a Patriot. That drive was a total slice of crap though. Maybe the popularity decline has sonething to do with them ditching Sandforce for inhouse designs...
I had terrible experiences with their drives and tech support. In one instance, to solve a Windows blue screen problem, their support told us to update the firmware on the drive, which bricked it. They then refused to return/repair the drive because "firmware updates void your warranty." In another case, we needed a quick replacement on a failed drive so we requested advance replacement. They immediately charged our card MSRP (double the actual retail price), but then it took them over 30 days to actually ship the replacement.
The quote in the article blames capital constraints, and difficulty acquiring, not a shortage. They are likely buying cheaper supply with higher failure rates, creating a death spiral.
If that is not the case, the author should kick himself in the balls repeatedly for using unrelated quotes to support a point, as I can't be arsed to dig past that stupidity.
Non story, failing company cuts corners and fails faster.
When you make your living selling out of spec parts it will, sooner or later, come back and bite you in the ass.
I don't know about other people, but I had nothing but bad experiences with their DRAM products. I would call their tech support and usually get a voicemail. They would never return those calls. If I called anothe department (sales always answered), they would just forward me to the same voicemail. If I was persistent enough, calling enoug times per day, I might get someone on the phone with technical support.
Their "performance" DRAM products seemed to deteriorate over time. I would configure my system with the exact voltage and timing numbers they specified and run a burn-in test. It would work great for the first couple of days. Perfect stabillity, good performance. Memory tests, kernel compiles, everything was great. But after the first few DAYS, it would all go to hell. There were no hard memory errors, but the system would start crashing during compiles. With a lot of effort, I managed two exchanges with OCZ (so that's three pairs of DIMMs I tried in sequence), and each set went through the same pattern -- worked great then started failing. After the third set, I paid the restocking fee with Newegg and bought form Crucial. I have no idea what the problem was, but OCZ was not interested in figuring it out.
Can we finally put the to bed the idea that being the first (or near first) mover into a specific market is important in carving out a long-term leadership role in that space, and perhaps have people focus instead on making a superior product instead?
I've avoided OCZ since I first heard of the vertex 4. Everyone, including them used 2 and 3 for the Sata version, but they had to jump up to 4 just to sound better. It seemed so dishonest I haven't given them a penny since.
The article quotes the CEO as saying the company is struggling due to "capital constraints". Then right below that, "This has been a common refrain. OCZ reports lower sales, it blames a shortage of NAND." Does the author truly not understand the difference between a shortage of cash to fund ongoing operations, and a shortage of parts?
Regardless, I don't see their departure from the scene as a great loss. Their spotty reputation for quality and customer service has caused me to avoid their products in general, and has apparently come back to bite them in the ass. The only sad part is that they might take PC Power and Cooling (one of the premier PSU manufacturers from back in the day, which OCZ acquired a few years ago) down with the ship.
There's an even better reason why nobody wants to sell flash to OCZ -- they've tainted the entire SSD industry so badly with their crap drives, no reputable manufacturer of flash wants to have its good name tarnished by association with them.
A lot of OCZ's problems were self-inflicted, with Sandforce's active complicity.
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.
Mark my words. If OCZ doesn't go bankrupt on its own accord, they're eventually going to get put out of business by a class-action lawsuit like the one that nailed HP almost 20 years ago. I'm talking about the one where HP's management intentionally ignored their engineers, and sold CD burners that didn't have enough RAM to buffer a complete track & instead depended upon Windows to feed them a steady stream of data with a degree of lockstep precision that Windows could neither promise nor reliably sustain even though their own engineers told them it couldn't work reliably, and was GUARANTEED to turn at least 5-20% of discs burned into coasters (back when a blank CD cost SEVERAL DOLLARS).
HP's engineers DID have a way to allow the drives to be reliably used without the buffer... write the .iso file to a FAT16 volume, then boot directly into DOS from a floppy to do the burning. However, like OCZ's management (who wanted the performance of an ultracap-protected drive, without the cost of the ultracap itself), HP's management wanted a cheap drive that could burn CDs under Windows, even if it meant they had to knowingly LIE about its ability to actually DO it.
warranty claims :D
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I think this is the SSD market maturing. For a while, Intel had good, but expensive drives. Then Intel stagnated for a while, as OCZ aimed to be the performance leader, but firmware issues and failed drives burned a bunch of us. Fast forward to today, and we see Samsung being very price aggressive with fast drives that are reliable. That's a perfect storm for OCZ.
Customer service was so bad, that I couldn't hear a word of their marketing.
Place nail here >+
I've never owned one of their SSDs, but I purchased OCZ RAM twice and did an RMA both times.
As the owner of an OCZ Vertex 2, this comment thread has made me very uncomfortable. Time to get serious about daily backups.
This goes for OCZ, Corsair, Razer... They bet on male teenager gamer hype, not quality.
https://dalgamotor.wordpress.com/ - Elektronik beyinlere ozgurluk asisi (Turkish)
As an OCZ company, I guess the end of OCZ will also be the end of PC Power and Cooling. I used to exclusively purchase PCP&C supplies because they were, at the time, designed right (rather than designed for a price point).
Every single goddamn OCZ SSD I have ever owned has crapped out in the same manner - it just disappears and takes all of my data with it.
Good riddance.
before my warranty runs out...
To be fair, I've only had one pair of Corsair DIMMs fail, ever. That one was because a power supply failed and shorted the motherboard and RAM as a result. less than 5 minutes on a phone call to Corsair and I had an RMA number. I even told them exactly what happened, I think they even sent a postage paid return shipping label. I now have 3 Corsaird Power Supplies in use (one for almost 3years, the other 2 less than 2 months) no issues with any of them yet.
Oh, and I'm 34. I'm more than happy to pay a premium if the Quality and Customer Service back up the price.
I'd not put corsair in the same bucket as the other two. Their RAM, for instance, will not spontaneously combust. The other two... yeah, you don't have to look very far to see that they have the build quality of white branded parts.
It's a problem when you look for, say, mechanical keyboards. Even companies that used to make good stuff, like das, now have cut costs so that you are going to get more life out of a random membrane keyboard.
I bought a couple of OCZ drives over the last few years for different computers and they all work fine. I'm not worried that they will fail and wipe my data because I only put programs and operating system stuff there (as shouldn't all of us here on /.?). I never bought the 'high end' gamer stuff. My data goes on a HDD and when I compile stuff and install it, it then goes on the SSD for fast performance. When I am working on something distributed from SSD it is backed up online through a version controll system so I don't lose anything major in the event of a fire or disk failure. For servers, you should have an RAID array of SSDs and the OCZs have been cheaper, so you should expect that they might fail -- but this should not impact what you do.
But their overvoltage ram was so garbage, and their tech support process was so awful, that i have personally steered 10s of customers away from them.
Never again would i buy ocz and looks like i was right.
-
Every single SSD benchmark web site has been singing praises over the OCZ SSDs for years now and I fell for the bait a bit like everyone else because OCZ's costs per GB were the lowest while performance the highest. I already bought an Intel X25-M 80GB G1 drive and have been happy with it but I recommended these drives to friends who were cash strapped as HDD replacements only to have 3 out of 4 OCZ Vertex 1's and 2's fail within a year and pissed off friends.
I still have one OCZ 40GB sitting in a box unopened that I don't wish to use for anything at all. Might have to take it out and shoot it because nobody on eBay wanted to buy it.
One PBX running Linux Asterisk for a company that I helped out started failing and corrupting their OS drive and they sent me the whole box. Luckily it was usable enough that I was able to buy an Intel V-25X 40GB SSD and do a disk copy while skipping errors and trash that OCZ Vertex 40GB. Then do a whole distro-upgrade that over-wrote pretty much the whole OS and all the corrupted packages and files but kept the config files that were uncorrupted intact saving their PBX server. Lucked out with that one.
I had an OCZ 750VA power supply that was reviewed and touted as the best of that review but after a few years my computer started experiencing strange errors, crashes, freezes, and I narrowed them down to the +12V rail instability and drops. Turned out that all the plugs were on a single 12V shared rail and the components and capacitors in the power supply must have been crap so they were wearing out and dropping voltage during load spikes. Replaced it with a Corsair HX750 modular power supply and have been happy and stable on a new system since for twice the number of years as that OCZ power supply.
Intel SSD Forever...?
Coincidentally, when I was searching for a new SSD I was thinking that the industry matured but when I looked at the recently past price and performance leader the Samsung 840 there were way too many negative posts on various retailer and forums regarding these drives failing without warning. Seemed like a similar situation to what I saw with OCZ.
I don't like paying the huge premiums for Intel SSD but it turns out that they are what I have been buying for 3 generations now, G1 40 & 80GB, G2 40GB & 80GB, G3 335 240GB. I don't know if this trend is going to end in the future.
Pity PC Power & Cooling is apparently going down with the OCZ ship. For the better part of a decade, I always heard PP&C PSUs were the best and they had prices to match that rep. I could never hope to afford one.
And then OCZ bought them, and curiously, the positive reviews became harder to find and the off-the-cuff remarks ("Hey so and so is a good brand of whatever, check it out!") stopped entirely.
Suddenly the prices had dropped into the normal range and now a 760 watt PP&C PSU is like $60. And you get an AMEX rebate card with it. The PSU itself is just some outsourced part they got from who knows where.
Sig for hire.
First time I've ever seen anyone on slashdot complain about something supporting Linux but not Windows.
I bet the same OCZ tech is getting another laugh today from reading your post.
I disagree. Corsair products are almost always of high build quality and reliability. They use reputable OEMs to manufacture their high end products (Flextronics/Seasonic for their PSUs) and have some of the best cases around. I wouldn't trade my Obsidian 800D for anything except for a 900D.
Even companies that used to make good stuff, like das, now have cut costs so that you are going to get more life out of a random membrane keyboard.
Das doesn't make the switches; Cherry does. Nearly every mechanical keyboard manufacturer these days uses Cherry MX switches, which are rated for 50 million cycles. Whether you're buying a mechanical keyboard from Das, WASD, Ducky, Razer, or any of a host of others, you're getting the exact same 50-million cycle switches.
In contrast, a membrane keyboard's switches are generally only rated for 3-5 million cycles.
To use the obligatory car analogy, it's like complaining that because the car's manufacturer didn't put in a premium audio system, the engine will only last for 10,000 miles.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Wrong list. I bought OCZ ram once and it failed memory test as well as it crashed while booting. I had it replaced with the warranty and the new one had a failure somewhere else. That's a 100% failure rate for everything I bought from OCZ, which is simply not good enough. On the other hand I never had any problems with Corsair and have bought from them multiple times. This experience appears to fit the picture of what you can find online from other people, though the 100% failure rate is a bit extreme.
I usually tell the rep right off the bat that we've got a number of whatever part I'm calling on around the office and have already verified the failure using a known good device/part.
Doesn't always work, but the majority of the time I get someone on the phone who understands the concept, it's gotten me to the "here's your RMA" part of the call pretty quickly.
Lets see here...Out of three OCZ SSD's I purchased, all three are dead.
Out of six Crucial and two Intel, none are dead and all have been in operation longer and under more stress.
I will never buy OCZ SSDs again.
Corsair are great! I have bought many of their products and they have never let me down.
Do watch the SSD market. I noticed that the local Frys is looking to all but purge their
inventory.
Is there a price jump, a price cut or some new stuff hitting the market?
I was all set to buy a SSD disk but the prices did not make sense and
the display astoundingly bollixed and confused.
My current plan is to move to a SSD and the new AC network links.
I can have large storage on my router/ cloud/ drive/ dropbox/ resource
and a light quick laptop with modest storage. The speed of SSD devices
is getting to be a serous game changer at home and at work.
But these OCZ folks seem to have stepped in it badly.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
In 2012:
http://www.behardware.com/articles/881-4/components-returns-rates-7.html
Link comes from earlier comment about high component return rates for OCZ.
There's a whole back story of financial malfeasance at OCZ. The previous CEO, Ryan Petersen, was almost certainly a crook. And I don't say that without cause. He was ousted amid a scandal where OCZ was lying about its financial statements.
OCZ was a darling of the Wall Street brokerage houses for about 15 minutes in 2011/2012. Solid State sales were growing and, because the NAND producers were irrationally over-producing, the price of NAND was very low in 2011. As an input cost to OCZ, falling NAND spot prices meant the company saw a steady improvement in gross margins. This was a story that Wall Street loves to hear: growing sales, improving gross margins, with profitability just around the corner. (As a side note, this is also a major factor in Apple's peak gross margin in March 2012----Wall Street is all confused about this one).
In 2012, all the major brokerages wrote glowing reports about the company, and there were rumors that Seagate was trying to buy them out. And right around that time, the NAND producers (Micron, Sandisk, Toshiba, Samsung) decided to cut production of NAND in order to increase prices. That would destroy OCZ's business model completely (since OCZ was dependent on purchasing NAND in the spot market---they were too small to get a fixed-price NAND deal with one of the producers...the kind of deal that big boys like Apple get).
The story gets much hazier from there on and what follows is my personal conjecture:
Seagate looked at OCZ. Their quants looked at the books and saw something was wrong. OCZ has a large amount of inventory relative to sales. At the same time, they were having difficulty purchasing NAND at attractive prices. And those two things don't really fit. You say that you can't purchase components, yet you have a whole lot of components on your balance sheet? OCZ explained it away by saying they didn't have the right type of NAND or that Micron didn't deliver on an order, but these were all excuses to hide the fact the "improving gross margins" story was now over.
Who knows exactly how they cooked the books, but it took about a year for OCZ to release financial statements for the period ending August 31, 2012. In other words, the lawyers and forensic accountants were trying to piece this mess together for the better part of a year.
The new CEO came in and tried to clean everything up but the business model is stuck in the same predicament as before: they're too small to purchase NAND at good prices, and they're competing with those same producers in SSD drives (e.g. Micron makes the NAND and Micron makes a competing SSD. Same goes for Samsung, Sandisk, etc.).
Anyhow, I know all this because I lost a few dollars drinking the OCZ kool-aid. Lessons learned.
Intel did the right thing and deployed their SSD upgrade software [intel.com] as a bootable CD.
I think that was the best way to do it last decade but it's a bit like an updated version of when every flash update required a 1.44MB floppy. CD drives are being phased out. Lots of machines don't come with CDs anymore including the one I'm using to type this. While I have a USB CD drive if I need it, I break it out *maybe* twice a year. Usually if I need drivers or software I get them online. If I need to take software with me I put it on a flash drive or an online storage service. I'm having a hard time remembering the last time I actually burned a CD.
Flash drives are a better option most of the time since they are smaller, reusable, repurpose-able, and take up less wasted space in my closet.
i'm just going over the batch of OCZs that we had to pull from locations all over the world. the cost of the recall was far in excess of the cost of the drives. over 200 of them. if you have an OCZ Vertex drive with firmware revision 1.11, it *will* fail spectacularly. all you need to do is set up 64 sets of parallel writes, run them for 10 minutes, and you *will* get data corruption. you can do this in a shell script (i used python) by spawning "cp -aux" of a directory hierarchy with 1500 subdirectories and 3,000 small files. 64 parallel sets of copying (and then deleting) i.e. if you do around 1.5 million file-directory creates and deletes you are *guaranteed* to have data corruption.
the strange thing: the very first Vertex OCZs released were absolutely fine. what i learned just yesterday was that *even* with a drive that has been consistently failing, if you downgrade its firmware to revision 1.7 *it becomes absolutely fine*.
the problem that we have is that upgrading units in-the-field when the firmware upgrade system provided by OCZ is an ISOLINUX cd image with FreeDOS and a firmware-flash program is going to be rather tricky when none of the systems have a screen let alone a keyboard.
by contrast, we have somewhere around 500 Intel 320s installed world-wide. there have only ever been 3 failures.
for the selection of the new drive (Intel 320s are end-of-life) i'm endeavouring to replicate that test system which was reported on slashdot to have destroyed 12 different SSDs within under an hour per drive. i have managed to destroy one already: Crucial M4. it took 2500 power-cycle interruptions (the program's still in development) so the M4 failed in under 24 hours. so don't get that one. still on the list: Innodisk 3-MP Sata Slim, Toshiba's new SSD, and Intel's new S3500.
the toshiba i can already tell you, if you interrupt its power you will find that, on power-up, some of the outstanding write requests will *not* have been actioned. this is partly good news: it means that the drive is detecting that it doesn't have power, so doesn't risk corrupting the drive. i'm looking forward to properly testing the 3-MP because they're cheap, small, and the datasheet has, unlike any other manufacturer, a heck of a lot of details about how they actually do power-loss protection. most other manufacturers don't even bother to mention power-loss protection, that's if you can find a proper datasheet at all.
Just an idea of how the company is run. Purchased an OCZ thumb drive. Lost the receipt. The thumb drive is clearly labeled and one of their products - it is supposed to have a lifetime warranty. I've owned many thumb drives and washed and dried plenty - not that I'd recommend that- and virtually all of them still work. This particular thumb drive had a short life plugged into a not so critical server. When it died - thought great - lifetime warranty - Ill get it replaced. Not a chance without receipt. I find this unacceptable w/ a lifetime warranty and a product that they can plain see is theirs. I WILL NEVER BUY A OCZ product. Junk!
Razer and OCZ suck, Corsair does not.
I'm not arguing with any of the anecdotal data posted here in the comments, just sharing my experience...
I've been running 8 vertex 3's in a raid-5 array for a while now (4 for over a year, 4 more added less than a year ago), and haven't had any problems with them. My thinking has been that they're cheap SSD's and having staggered the purchase of them, I'm unlikely to have more than one fail on me at the same time.
I do not know if I'm lucky, or my usage patterns and hardware/software set-up have skirted many of the issues associated with these drives, but I have been watching the array closely, and haven't been seeing any issues.
All of that being said, its unlikely that I will be replacing the drives in the array with more OCZ drives as they fail.
OCZ's drives don't fail at an any higher rate than, say, WD's first generation SATA 3.0 drives, so look at the bright side: If the two vendors were sports cars, your use of OCZ SSDs would ensure that people emitted the proper "Wow!" when they read how fast you were going before your brakes failed and you hit the tree.
(lolll...personally, I bought some Vertex IIs, some Agility 2s...and stopped.)
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
When I saw this: http://www.behardware.com/articles/881-7/components-returns-rates-7.html
I decided I would never buy any OCZ product.
Seriously? A 40% return rate on some products?
Every OCZ drive I've ever bought has not functioned properly out of the box. One of them worked after a firmware upgrade (and has been working for several years.) The other never worked and I returned it to the vendor.
I've never had to upgrade the firmware on a hard drive before. The first one I wrote off as "It's a new product, there are some bugs." After the second one, I was done. If I bought a car and had to load a special utility and buy a special cable to flash the ECU before the car would run reliably, I wouldn't have bought the car in the first place.