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?"

Comments

Rebates

[apcullen]

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.

Vertex 2

[RobHostetter]

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.

Reputation killing them

[abigsmurf]

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.

Re:Full of BS

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

My own experience with OCZ drives is a 100% failure rate and no support to speak of.

Far more significantly, though, my supplier's experience with them was that they saw such a high proportion of returns that they dropped the brand entirely. My anecdotal data point might have been down to bad luck, but the odds of the pattern my supplier told me about being down to luck would be tiny.