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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
All niche market products suffer the same fate when expectations for broad market type growth are assumed.
If you could provide a source(even if your numbers aren't completely accurate) you would make me very happy. I have been unable to find anything that discusses reliability of different manufacturers like you just described.
I have always sworn by Intel while friends have bought OCZ(because they were cheaper per GB) and several have had nothing but problems but others have sworn their OCZ was rock solid. On the other hand, I bought only Intels since the day the G2 series hit the market. Every single one is still in use and none of them have had any problems. In fact, I haven't had to reinstall windows as often as I've had to in the past. Not sure if its because Win7 is better than WinXP, the SSDs are more reliable than platter based disks, or both.
But even then, I still swear by Intel every time a friend makes a recommendation, regardless of the benchmarks and the (often) slightly higher price per GB.
Oh my God! The money quote:
Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
Funny... Similar experience didn't convinced me to avoid company XYZ, but instead to completely avoid any and all mail-in rebates... The whole idea is a complete scam that is easily and frequently abused.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Jobs himself had to tell the CEO of OCZ to cut out the crap products.
Good-bye
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.
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.
My experience with all drives, solid state and spinning, is a 100% failure rate... eventually.
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
If you couldn't find a citation then maybe you shouldn't have fucking said it.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."