SSD Manufacturer OCZ Preparing For Bankruptcy

JDG1980 writes "OCZ, a manufacturer of solid-state drives, says it will file for bankruptcy. This move is being forced by Hercules Technology Growth Capital, which had lent $30 million to OCZ under terms that were later breached. The most likely outcome of this bankruptcy is that OCZ's assets (including the Indilinx controller IP) will be purchased by Toshiba. If this deal falls through, the company will be liquidated. No word yet on what a Toshiba purchase would mean in terms of warranty support for OCZ's notoriously unreliable drives."

Comments

...and

[Konster]

...and not a single customer was surprised.

Re:...and

[Joce640k]

Note to self: Don't buy any new Toshiba-manufactured SSDs...

Re: ...and

[Hadlock]

European retailers publish their return rates by brand, OCZ has consistently been #1 by a wide margin, sometimes having as high as one in five (that's 20% for those of you following along at home) return rates for some models, the brand as a whole has been at around 8% for almost two years now. They're ticking time bombs. By contrast, intel, samsung et all generally have a return rate around 2% which is standard for retail items in general. Something is obviously very wrong. Also you should note that OEMs do not touch OCZ products with a 20 ft pole, you can only buy them at retail which should be a huge red flag.

Warranties

[Anne_Nonymous]

>> No word yet on what a Toshiba purchase would mean in terms of warranty support for OCZ's notoriously unreliable drives

You can expect the same level of warranty service that you've always received from OCZ.

Re:Warranties

[ArbitraryName]

Incorrect. Warranties are considered unsecured liabilities. Once the company files for (Chapter 7) bankruptcy they stop honoring warranties just like they stop paying debts. The company's assets are sold and creditors are repaid in a set order. Unsecured debts are absolutely dead last and are generally never paid (after all, if they could have paid them they wouldn't likely be filing bankruptcy. Assets sold in bankruptcy are free from any liens or claims. Toshiba would be under no obligation to warranty any OCZ products, as they would have simply purchased their assets.

Re:Warranties

[FatdogHaiku]

Unless Toshiba actually agrees to assume the liabilities of OCZ (and WHY would they do that?) then no, the obligation to cover old products is not transferred. If a building contractor goes belly up and you buy his assets (materials, vehicles, tools & equipment, unsold inventory, client lists, etc.) that does not make you responsible for work he did in the past. Now, "if" you keep the brand alive you would most likely have to stand behind previous commitments, but again WHY would Toshiba do that? Toshiba is solid and OCZ is on fire. Toshiba will gain new IP and physical plants and resources and OCZ will be ash. Shareholders will get pennies on the dollar, customers will get screwed without lube. For warranty inquiries, contact the bankruptcy trustee.

STILL not accurate and STILL misquoted

[slashmydots]

Their drives don't have a high failure rate! They're not unreliable! It was all based on a single study that showed a high return rate. That was because the morons at OCZ released them with beta level firmware that made the first batch of 3 and 4 series drives not be recognized 100% of the time by many BIOSes. I built over 50 computers with OCZ SSDs and about 40 of them had to be flashed to the latest firmware before they operated correctly. After that, zero out of 50 came back in 2 years so that means zero failed. They used 9000 write cycle flash memory instead of, for example, Kingston HyperX 3K's 3000 rating. They had an internal, firmware-based TRIM style sweep in case your OS didn't support TRIM too. They were one of the best drives out there.
Unfortunately, I hate them because they decided to "stop being competitive" and single handedly drove up the price of SSDs basically by price fixing. Their drives went up 50% in price overnight. That was such bullshit, they deserve bankruptcy.

Re:STILL not accurate and STILL misquoted

[0123456]

I built over 50 computers with OCZ SSDs and about 40 of them had to be flashed to the latest firmware before they operated correctly.

In some parts of the universe, we call not working correctly 80% of the time 'unreliable'.

Even if it's fixed, that kind of reputation hangs around for a long time.

Re:STILL not accurate and STILL misquoted

[Anonymous Coward]

I must have gotten some of the messed up drives you were supposed to. I bought 3 OCZ SSDs. All three different sizes, each purchased a few weeks apart. Within a year, and fairly close in time, all three died. Died as in DEAD, with no warning or indications of a problem. Not recognized by BIOS, not flashable, one smelled like burnt electronics, DEAD. OCZ happily replaced all of them. But I figured...this is either an unlikely coincidence or their drives suck. Rather than figure out the answer to that, I bought Crucial and Intel SSDs and all have been running for more than twice as long as the OCZ SSDs with no issues.

Re:STILL not accurate and STILL misquoted

[iCEBaLM]

But they're not incorrectly working 80% of the time, they're incorrectly working once, fixed, and then they work for the rest of the products life.

Re:STILL not accurate and STILL misquoted

[ArbitraryName]

The study you are talking about was based on returns from between six months and one year after purchase. It does not cover DOA parts. Your theory is mistaken.

Re:STILL not accurate and STILL misquoted

[cyberjock1980]

I disagree. I've had several friends(at least 4 off the top of my head) that have bought OCZs. None of them lasted 6 months without having to do an RMA. One friend had 3 RMAs in about 9 months. Despite having 3 months left on his warranty he went with Intel(because of my recommendation) because it wasn't worth his time to continually have to restore from backup to a temporary drive while he does the RMA.

Even in forums I hear people talk about failed OCZ drives regularly. Sure, there's the occasional Samsung and Intel in there. But OCZ sure is mentioned FAR more frequently than the other brands. I'm not convinced that their market share is 90% to offset the number of users that complain about failed disks.

Personally, I don't care if they used 1-million write cycle flash memory instead of Kingston's 3000 cycle memory. If every drive I've had second hand experience with has to be RMAd in less than 6 months something is horribly wrong and I'd be avoiding that product or brand. There's alot more to a drive than just the number of write cycles. Poorly written SSD firmware could easily make a drive with a very long lifespan be abnormally short due to write amplification. So feel free to keep talking numbers, cause the comparision of write cycles is only a very small part of what makes an SSD reliable(or not).

In my opinion OCZ has undoubtedly made some bad models. Are they all bad? Probably not. But, it doesn't take much to earn a reputation for being crappy. And once you've earned that reputation it's going to take some serious convincing to get people to spend money on your product again. In my case, they'd have to give me a drive for free to prove that they really are just as reliable as the 3 Intel drives I've had in my 3 main machines that haven't failed in 3 years+ of use.

Re:STILL not accurate and STILL misquoted

[0123456]

But they're not incorrectly working 80% of the time, they're incorrectly working once, fixed, and then they work for the rest of the products life.

So they magically fix themselves?

If I buy something, I want it to work out of the box. If it didn't work out of the box 80% of the time, I'd call it 'unreliable'. I wouldn't care whether I can download some program from the Internet to fix it, you'd already have lost me as a customer.

Re:STILL not accurate and STILL misquoted

[0123456]

I can't understand how some one like you would want to build a computer. Your complaints would put legos or megablocks out of business.

I've built four computers for my own use in the last four years. They all worked out of the box, and are all still working.

Why shouldn't I expect a new computer built from new parts to just work?

Re:Is this the same OCZ that sells memory?

[Konster]

They used to sell memory, but the margins could support their high rate of rma replacements, so they gave up.

I'm surprised they never turned around their rather cavalier approach to QA since it cost them a lot of money for years and years.

How many?

[yoshi_mon]

I use Intel SSDs, period. I'm not a fan of Intel at all and really want AMD to succeed such that we have some compititon in the marketplace. But when it comes to SSDs Intel holds the best non-failure rate that I've found.

I've paid more but on my own personal rigs as well as every client's, I've not had any failure. And they are fast too. I mean duh, they are SSDs!

But whenever I saw OCZ I saw marketing. I mean I guess they had some good drives using reliable chips and good controllers but from what I saw it was all about the marketing. Which leads me to my post's question. How many engineers did they really have at that company that worked on things vs the amount of MBA marketeers.

In short I never saw OCZ as a serious company. They were not a Corsair or some other startup that had real desires to make good hardware. Rather they had a lot of marketing push and very little else. The level of return on their SSDs was super high and once I saw that it told me all I needed to know about them. Anyone can make some RAM and slap on some crafted aluminum heatsink onto it. Not everyone can make a SSD.

I knew it!

[TheRealQuestor]

Thank GOD a couple weeks ago I RMA'd the 3rd drive that had failed in less than year. All 3 were Vertex 3 120 Gig. So at least now I have 1 that should be good for another 6 months. The support really was good with no questions asked really on all 3 drives. But what does suck is I bought 3 of them and ALL 3 DIED. I knew after the 1st one died within 60 days I was going to have issues. Over the years I had issues with Ram compatibility and I just knew the drives were going to be iffy. But they are so damn fast and the price was decent [1st one was 300 bucks, 2nd one was 220 [bought about 3 months later] and lastly the 3rd drive was just over 150 bucks] Now they sell for like 80 bucks. After the 3rd one died about 4 months ago or that I was never going to buy an OCZ drive again. I finally broke down and got an RMA after my #2 drive that was replaced about 6 months ago started tossing errors that I had better RMA the drive. Glad I did.