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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
As a former service manager to a laptop ODM/Integrator, their RMA process sucks, and our MTBF with their devices in custom laptops was drastically lower on every model. When you are dealing with gamers and power users that want to spend 2000-3000 dollars on a laptop, the last thing you need is faulty hardware weeks out of the box AND a 2-3 week + turnaround with OEM direct RMA's.
If it's not broken, let's fix it till it is.
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.
Jobs himself had to tell the CEO of OCZ to cut out the crap products.
A link would help back that statement. It would also make inroads on countering the whole "cult of Steve Jobs's personality" label that Apple users don't understand why they can't shake. Else what you stated comes out as "do you not recall the iScriptures? The LORD commanded the heathens at OCZ, but they did not obey, and thus their business was torn asunder by His divine might, and His followers celebrated the power of their rightful LORD by buying more iPhones and iPads, as is His will. This is the word of Jobs, Sosumi."
Same here. OCZ has been awful as far as failure rates. I've had three of them die on me. Never again.
I've never had experience with their SSD drives. I have, however, had experience with their RAM and power supplies, and after those experiences I avoided their SSDs like the plague...
Ditto with my local computer store, the failure rate was so high they dropped them completely. I don't think they'll even let you special order them now.
Hell it don't take Steve Jobs to know OCZ is shit, just talk to any system builder. i have several gamer customers and they ALL ended up getting burned by OCZ at least once. I'd tell them "Look at the reviews, they are burning folks" but all they cared about was their rank on the boards...well they all ended up with paperweights. OCZ is a classic example of "treat customers like shit and watch them dry up".
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
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!
I used a handful of OCZ vertex 2's (back then it was like $3 per GB) in a couple of servers (in enterprise setting) for almost three years. Still running.
I also own four vertex 4's in a RAID 10 setup, all four drive still running after a year.
Either there is a incredible bad luck streak, or there is some abuse going on. The first and only SSD failure I have come across is a 120GB Intel X25-m.
New Economic Perspectives
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."
I can back this up. I had seven OCZ drives in various customer computers during their firmware debacle. One bricked after two weeks. OCZ claimed there was nothing wrong with their drives. Then they released 2.11 firmware to fix the imaginary issue. The forums filled with complaints that it had INCREASED the number of BSODs. OCZ said they can't reproduce what we were all seeing and experiencing, but released version 2.15 IIRC which did fix the issue. However... The CS was exceptionally rude through the entire time. The firmware update could not be applied in a Windows environment, even though other vendors do manage to do this. The drive needed to be pulled and connected to a different PC as a non-boot drive and updated from there. And when I tried to do this using my old workhorse computer, the update failed. OCZ support told me that my motherboard and chipset were not compatible. (MSI P35-Neo2 FR, not an uncommon board.) The issue was rare but not rare enough, and if it bricked you lost everything, no recourse. Backups of course, but the drive was toast. So was my time. I returned all drives to Microcenter and ordered fresh stock from Newegg. OCZ can burn in hell.