Yeah but those TLC SSDs are also the best value SSDs on the market. And as Techreport's findings have shown can last over 200 TiB worth of writes (250 GB model).
No. Don't be so cynical. They died for a number of reasons. Their poor reliability is well enough known. That led to high return rates. Absorbing other companies is also difficult.
Ahh crap, I never got around to the 3rd RMA for the Agility 4 that's been sitting in my desk for months. Guess I need to do that pronto. And a ton of people in the comments here called it in several articles with some astute observations, like the absurd number of OCZ refurb deals Newegg has been offering for weeks now.
bummer, I remember when the 1st SSD's were having those terrible "studder" issues with random writes, OCZ was the company that actually responded to and worked with Anandtech to figure out the cause of the problems. This kind of partnership is not oft found in corporate america. I hope their employees are not out of a job, they have some great talent there.
Hold on a minute. This is not what happened. Ryan/OCZ tried to burry the issue which is what they later did again with the Vertex 2 25nm fiasco. Here's what happened when Anandtech discovered the "studder"
"This is Ryan Petersen:
He’s the CEO of OCZ Technology. He wasn’t too happy after my Intel X25-M SSD review.
Although that review was about the X25-M, it addressed a major shortcoming with a number of other SSDs in the market - the most popular at the time being OCZ’s Core line.
The problem with the Core line was that although they were competitively priced, they had a major performance issue: small file write latency. The problem manifested itself in system-wide stuttering during disk intensive multitasking. It wouldn’t take a lot to make those drives stutter, and until that article went live, everyone assumed that the problem was Windows, the disk controller, or something else.
I placed the blame on the drives and Ryan wasn’t all too happy."
OCZ can not go away soon enough. It is Intel that made SSDs what they are now (both brought down price, increased IO and reliability with their first offering)
Ding dong the witch is dead. OCZ's decision to pair Sandforce controllers with garbage flash memory is primarily responsible for the unjustified bad reputation Sandforce drives have in some communities. (Yeah Sandforce's firmware should have handled the high error rate better, but you shouldn't make SSDs with known-defective NAND.)
Intel's Sandforce drives have a perfectly good reliability record, and Apple has been using Sandforce controllers in their notebooks for some time now without any major complaints.
Those are also drives that shipped with RAISE error correction disabled. I think the idea that RAISE wasn't required for consumer drives was put to bed quite some time ago.
I feel like I should defend this a bit. Pointing out that Apple/Toshiba shipped Sandforce drives that were recalled was good criticism, and in theory the built-in ECC should be able to handle the error rates of good quality NAND without needing RAISE. There's also no evidence that RAISE would have helped in any way with the issues Apple/Toshiba SSDs experienced. However, I think it's telling that every other NAND manufacturer (Intel and SanDisk) and the brands that position for quality (Corsair, Mushkin) shipped ONLY drives with RAISE enabled. The companies shipping drives with RAISE disabled were largely new or fly-by-nights, with some big low-end brands (Kingston, ADATA)...and Apple/Toshiba. I doubt this was the only choice they made that affected the reliability of these devices.
Likely to match the capacity. RAISE-enabled SSDs are 120GB, 240GB, 480GB... while the Samsung and SanDisk SSDs that Apple also uses are 256GB and 512GB (Toshiba only used in 64GB and 128GB flavors). It might have caused confusion and would have been bad for marketing, especially as Apple doesn't like to talk about the components in detail.
Farewell OCZ. There are/were a lot of great guys there who really worked hard to provide great products. Back in the DDR1 days they were one of the big supporters of over clocking and helped to develop memory over clocking theory. They will be missed.
Reliability was a reason I stayed away from their drives.
What happens to PC Power & Cooling? OCZ owns them too. I have a PS from them and would buy more from them. I'm very happy with what I have gotten from PC Power & Cooling. There is no reason they should go under with the OCZ ship.
Yeah, I'd be curious to know that too. PCP&C is a pretty venerable brand as components go, I remember reading a book ten years ago where the author swore by their units. I had been concerned that their quality might drop off when they got bought but I haven't heard much about them since that.
Every single stick of ram I have purchased from them, as well as every single stick my friends have purchased from them have been defective (obviously on purpose) and corrupted our installs innumerable times.
They shouldn't just die, they should be banned from existing.
After that experience, the only RAM I and my friends purchase is Crucial (Micron).
Non-ram manufacturers don't care enough about their reputation enough not to screw you over and over and over.
I made the exact same recommendation back in the day when Sandforce came out for people to use Crucial (Micron) drives because they also make the memory chips for those drives.
The people who didn't listen got screwed over and over by their defective drives.
Sad to see one of the SSD pioneers going bankrupt. I know lots of people have had issues with their stuff, but almost since the company's inception, I've had various products from them in my PCs, and enjoyed nothing but good prices and solid performance.
I have a 60 GB Vertex 2 and a 120 GB Vertex 3. No real complaints about either, and both are still in service and functioning well. I never had any of the oft reported reliability issues. I'm sad to see them go.
Sad to see them go, although there was a lot of bad press surrounding them, not all of it was deserved. I have 4 OCZ SSD's still in use (1xVertex1, 3xVertex2) and they have all performed admirably from the day I got them. They just have a guide on how to use them, but so did all First and Second generation SSD controllers. Overprovisioning people, it's important for many reasons, especially with these older controllers!
Anyway, sad to see them go, let's hope the good people working there get some job security soon by a company (toshiba?) taking them over.
I bought an OCZ Vertex 2 120GB couple of years ago. It performed significantly worse than all the hardware review results online. After lots of digging around, it turns out my Vertex was a secret 'revision' which they used less NAND chips ( but more capacity per NAND to keep the same stroage capacity) to cut cost, even though it means they are shipping a by-design slower product under the same banner. On top of that, it died after about 16 months.
I was never going to buy another OCZ product again.
yeah common problem I feel. Seen various reports like yours for different hardware such as graphics cards and motherboards. This highlights a problem with the review system. 90% of reviews seem to get free hardware supplied from the vendor, the vendor is likely to send them superior hardware to what is in retail. So there is immediate problems, (a) the product isnt a retail model and (b) the reviewer wants to maintain good relations so can get future free products. Also there is what you just mentioned that often early production runs are betetr quality than later runs because the company only needs good feedback in the early weeks, then later on when the attentions is removed from the product the components get silently changed round.
My personal experience was with my asus motherboard which I am still using now. It turns out the usb3 ports believe it or not are hardwired to the usb2 controller, I have 4 spare boards of the same model, when I discovered the problem I tested the other 3 and they all had the same problem. The other 3 were still on shipped bios, the one I am using on new bios, I got no idea if this was fixable via bios (since I believe the ports were hardwired to bth usb2 and usb3 but were changed via bios config) as asus refused to look into it citing that the board is too old, out of warranty etc. This left a sour taste in my mouth as I wont give a company more money who thinks they only need to fix new product's (probably to stop bad PR damaging sales). My point is that not a single reviewer of the board I have tested the usb3 ports. Because when it was released was no usb3 devices so I guess none of them felt the need to (or they did test, found same issue but censored it). My guess is every board hipped of my model had the same fault.
Just let Doug Dodson take over his old PC Power & Cooling again.
There is nothing to gain for Toshiba here. They already makes their own (branded) controllers and firmware, they do pretty well there, and ever body that stayed in Korea from the Indilinx-team got sacked when they closed the offices there about a year ago or switched companies on their own. Including going over to Toshiba. Most of the key US-based people left too. They really don't want any of their almost 600 employees. Certainly not their product base. Buying Barefoot-3 IP would make no sense either. There just can't be that many US and UK based people involved in that any more, and nobody needs to buy the company to hire the talent. I'm pretty sure nobody needs 300 administrators either.
They could still walk away from a deal as they haven't agreed on terms, what and price yet. Or they could just bid on the patents and walk away. It's really up to the court proceedings. It's not that they can say ok just take the firm to Toshiba as they have not agreed to do such a thing. Obviously they don't want 600 new employees, their product line and 300 administrative/support staff. PCP&C should obviously be sold off to Mr Dodson again, so he can take over his old firm and run it like before the OCZ buyout. Toshiba has no interest in taking over all their business or products, and even if they wanted the few remaining Barefoot-3 staff that's just a tiny fraction of the business, and they could probably just hire the people instead of spending money on buying liquidated assets.
Point is, is that it doesn't really matter if all of OCZ goes, engineers have or will find other jobs and the only part that is interesting is PCP&C, and not that they sell SSDs some OEM builds for them or that they have (had) a few guys doing the Barefoot controller and software.
Toshiba seems to do fine by selling nand for eMMC, third party SandForce and Marvell users or their own Marvell-derived with their own firmware SSD-drives to lots of customers. Micron has no fully custom controller either. SK Hynix has LAMD, Intel only uses their own controllers in Enterprise. Samsung has theirs. Companies like Seagate, WD, or OEMs still need to turn to companies like Toshiba which can offer a ready drive for them. Companies like Lite-on (Plextor) needs to buy their solution from somewhere. Plextor-drives uses Toshiba NAND with Marvell for that matter. If Lite-On wants the barefoot-controller they can just buy it from OCZ and start developing their own silicon for that matter. Sandisk which is a partner in the Toshiba NAND-fabs uses their own Marvell-solution too. It's not like Barefoot seems to fill any role.
Hmm... I guess a few bad quarters killed them? They seemed to be doing well; although the Agility/Vertex 1/2/3 generations were failure prone, they seemed to improve as time went on and they were very popular for a time.
I guess the fact that everyone has been going with Intel/Samsung/Crucial for reliability and OCZ's reputation as the least reliable SSD manufacturer was their undoing?
Not to mention their unfocused product lineup - in addition to the Agility, Vertex and unnecessary "Solid" series they had a new Vector lineup with their in-house Indilinx controller that was never very clearly marketed to consumers. Samsung got it right IMO with two products - their regular TLC lineup (840 & EVO) and the "Pro" series. No need for 4+ different lineups with all sorts of different memory configurations. Just build one or two models and make them reliable!
Hopefully Toshiba acquires the entirety of OCZ's assets and pursues the SSD market with OCZ's ferocity with an increased emphasis in power consumption.
Well that's too bad. I love my 512GB Vertex 4. I've had it for over a year now with no issues at all. I can't really say the news comes as a surprise though with all the competition in the SSD business.
Well it was a tough market to be in to begin with. I have no idea why they went all in on this. Since it was only a matter of time the NAND manufacture step in the SSD game. Samsung done this alone with Intel/Micron.
Intel has the reliability reputation. I think there goes 40% of the market. Then there are those cost conscious. And you can never win those who make their own NAND. There goes another 40% of the market. ( 40% are just imaginary numbers for argument ).
So they are effectively competing for the 20% market against all other players. OEM like Apple will be making their own SSD, The PC market is rapdily shrinking, adding their recent problems with SSD drives.
It seems fate has been decided for them a long while ago
OEM's like Apple will just like every other OEM contract out the SSD, even when they use special (custom) connectors. Even though they bought anobit they don't do SSD-controllers. Thus Samsung is their main supplier now, they have been using SanDisk, and Toshiba too before but they are left out now when they have no PCIe solution available at the moment.
Intel began using their own controllers, their consumer stuff don't any more. Samsung has been doing their own since they entered the game, and SK Hynix has bought LAMD which is pretty decent. Toshiba already has a custom Marvell controller (Toshiba-branded) and their own firmware which works great. WD/HGST bought sTEC, Seagate got their own SAS-SSD controller by now. SanDisk, Lite-on and possibly a few others prefers Marvell at the moment. Crucial/Micron does go the Marvell/custom-firmware route. Toshiba would probably be worse of with Barefoot from OCZ.
Plus the idea that Apple could turn away from sourcing Samsung when they always saves Apple is ridiculous. When they have monitor (panel) problems with their other 2-3 suppliers they always source and turn to Samsung for higher volumes, they still manufacturing all their SoCs, provide a lot of DRAM and NAND (eMMC), and now they are the only ones providing PCIe SSD's for Apple's machines. Samsung is one of three major DRAM suppliers now that Micron has taken over Elpida. Also they supply most of the battery cells to customers like Apple. Industrial conglomerates can do stuff. NAND is basically split between IM Flash (Intel/Micron), Samsung, Toshiba and SK Hynix, with SanDisk getting a share out of Toshiba's plants and doing stuff like their own eMMC memory. It's not a Samsung v Intel case there.
Ah wait your right, it has been used in Macbook Airs among others, I simply didn't remember even though I'm sure I saw it in tear downs and it's the Marvell 88SS9183 so they are not alone but they might actually use Samsung DRAM on the SanDisk ones :) That choice is SanDisk's own and they use both SK Hynix and Samsung DRAM on those that I've seen pictures of. Right now Marvell or Samsung is pretty much the only controller choice you got. When it comes to PCIe client-devices already out. I guess only Apple knows who they will source the most from though. Toshiba could supply them with the same any way. I guess they could source from Lite-on too. I guess Toshiba is still busy floggin their own branded version without DRAM, aka their SATA-based M.2 drive. Only a matter of time before we see A-data M.2 PCIe drives, and so on and others in the wild too. Any way, Sony seems to have gone Korean and use XP941 in systems like Sony Vaio Pro. But that is just one other thing to speak against trying to do something with Barefoot-3, the Toshiba/SanDisk-NAND already does PCIe M.2/Apple-drives with bothering with Indilinx/PLX-IP.
How many remember them from back in the Pentium 2/3 days? I think even then, they had a reputation for unreliably shipping RAM that was supposed to be great for those that actually had it arrive. Much credit to them for turning around some years later and creating the first decent SSD that produced consistent performance against the Super Talent/JMicron drives of the day (and Anand, of course).
Sad day. They always went above and beyond to help, really did shake up the consumer flash market (on price too) and were a thoroughly nice bunch of guys with a dream, trying extra hard to make it happen.
I have two OCZ Vertex 3's in Raid 0 for my main C drive and never, not once, had an issue. I think it has been nearly two years now as well.
Well,I am one of those who contributed to this. Ever since I understood OCZ's ideology("to hell with reliabilty,we just want awesome performance numbers") I constantly avoided their products and always replaced any OCZ SSD in systems I configure on the Internet. I'm both glad and sorry they ended up like this. I'm glad because they deserved it,given how awful a lot of their products were. I'm sorry because there's less competition in the market.
My second (!) replacement Vertex 2 died a few months ago, so that's a total 3 of these pieces of crap that died on me. Good riddance, OCZ. You won't be missed.
No it's not; their shoddy products is what killed them. I was stupid enough to buy their SSD and PSU. Once that SSD died about 40 days after the purchase I fortunately got a full refund from the store (which went towards the purchase of Samsung's 830 series SSD), and as for the "ModXStream pro" PSU I had to take that damn thing apart and stick some bits under the plastic foil that covers section of the exhaust just to get rid of the unbearable noise, because some idiot thought this noise would be a great design feature.
I wowed to never buy another OCZ product again and it appears that this manifested sooner (and in a different way) than I ever imagined :-)
Apparently folks here are too young too remember. Platinum rev. 2 DDR RAM from OCZ was the gold standard for years. They made some pretty awesome high-voltage DDR stuff too. Those were the days...
OCZ has been trying to get loans to stay afloat for the last several months. There was some problem with there last CEO. That why it pay to use forum like this and other before you spent your hard earned money. There 3 and 5 year warrant don't mean much once they filed bankruptcy.
It's funny how peoples' experiences vary. I have more than thirty OCZ SSDs, not a single issue with any of them so far (ranges from 60GB V2E to vector 256GB and Vertex4 512GB, all sorts inbetween, including a dozen MAX IOPS 120s).
Oddly enough, the only OCZ product I bought which I didn't like was a PSU, ever since which I've stuck to Thermaltake Toughpower.
As someone said earlier though, back in the DDR2 days I had some OCZ 800MHz kits and they worked very well.
To me it's sad. Their early policies were obviously not good as regards product reliability, but I think they learned from that and since then the models from the Vertex4 onwards have been good. I have several Vectors, V4s, etc. What it really means now is less competition, which is a real shame given the equivalent state of affairs elsewhere in the world of PC components.
I currently own and use multiple OCZ SSDs, DIMMs, power supplies, and even used niche market items like the DDR-Booster and haven't had a single issue with them. It was sad seeing them ditch memory production when being one of the top vendors for high speed RAM. Once they went from being the premier SandForce vendor who had special access to firmware to using Marvell and Indilinx IP, my love affair pretty much ended. Unless other vendors start producing controllers with write amplification less than one, I'll only ever buy SandForce based drives, performance be damned. Thus, I certainly had no plans of supporting OCZ much in the future.
"It's sad to see OCZ going because they've been one of the pioneers in the consumer SSD industry." Not true. OCZ Core was a terrible product. We now know it was Jmicron at fault but OCZ weren't trying to fix anything. Intel's X25M was the game changer and forced SSD makers to stop releasing overpriced crap. I still remember OCZ trying to sell Vertex 1s for the same price as X25Ms. Bunch greedy idiots
That's quite sad. I've liked my OCZ products (even the ones that have had firmware bugs) but I especially liked reading about what the company were up to. As a smaller company they were able to keep changing their way of doing things to try to keep ahead. From this news, I suppose taking those risks hasn't always paid off.
My DDR2 Reapers are still going strong after all this time.
Never used anything OCZ except memory, it always worked - and it still working several years later, int he builds I used it in. But I don't try any extreme overclocks, especially with memory. In fact, of the last 5 systems I built, only the most current one has RAM from someone else, only because the 16GB kit I got was cheaper from someone other than OCZ at the time. One stored away, one is my server which has been on 24/7 for 3 years now, one is my previous desktop which is used regularly, and the other is an Atom box runnign Linux which controls my model railroad, and is used infrequently, lets of power on/off cycles. After seeing the reviews here, I wasn;t about to buy an OCZ SSD. The Kingstons in two of my older computers plus the Samsung in my most recent have been extremely reliable. The only OCZ Flash anything I have are a couple of 4GB USB sticks that came as promos, one with the RAM and one I think came with a power supply. They too work fine
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Chupk - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
Finally.Montago - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
What do you mean, finally ?OCZ was one of the SSD manufactures that made MLC flash instead of TLC like Samsung... at a good price ! ... maybe thats why they died ?
blanarahul - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
Yeah but those TLC SSDs are also the best value SSDs on the market. And as Techreport's findings have shown can last over 200 TiB worth of writes (250 GB model).chrnochime - Saturday, November 30, 2013 - link
4 full rewrites for 200 days. Yeah that's mighty imrpessive.TheWrongChristian - Monday, December 2, 2013 - link
Why the hell would you be writing 1TB a day? If you were, you clearly wouldn't be choosing a consumer level drive.I'd love to work out if I'd EVER written 200TB of data to all of my personal storage past and present combined. I'd be surprised if I had.
Guspaz - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
OCZ didn't manufacture any flash... they make SSDs, not NAND. Most other SSD companies also use MLC... even Samsung has MLC products.BillB0B - Friday, November 29, 2013 - link
I didn't think they manufacture any flash memory they were like the majority of company selling SSD buying there memory from the large company's.melgross - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
No. Don't be so cynical. They died for a number of reasons. Their poor reliability is well enough known. That led to high return rates. Absorbing other companies is also difficult.WinterCharm - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
I think the problem was definitely reliability, and the number of returns it led to :(StevoLincolnite - Thursday, November 28, 2013 - link
Agreed, reliability did play a big part as well as miss-management.With that in mind, my OCZ Vertex 2 64Gb is still going strong even after 3+ years. :)
menting - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
like Guspaz said, OCZ didn't make any flash.Jun91 - Thursday, December 5, 2013 - link
If you are aware of their's financial situation, OCZ had struggle for a very, very long time.It is, finally.
Bob Todd - Thursday, November 28, 2013 - link
Ahh crap, I never got around to the 3rd RMA for the Agility 4 that's been sitting in my desk for months. Guess I need to do that pronto. And a ton of people in the comments here called it in several articles with some astute observations, like the absurd number of OCZ refurb deals Newegg has been offering for weeks now.Rocket321 - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
bummer, I remember when the 1st SSD's were having those terrible "studder" issues with random writes, OCZ was the company that actually responded to and worked with Anandtech to figure out the cause of the problems. This kind of partnership is not oft found in corporate america. I hope their employees are not out of a job, they have some great talent there.semo - Sunday, December 1, 2013 - link
Hold on a minute. This is not what happened. Ryan/OCZ tried to burry the issue which is what they later did again with the Vertex 2 25nm fiasco. Here's what happened when Anandtech discovered the "studder""This is Ryan Petersen:
He’s the CEO of OCZ Technology. He wasn’t too happy after my Intel X25-M SSD review.
Although that review was about the X25-M, it addressed a major shortcoming with a number of other SSDs in the market - the most popular at the time being OCZ’s Core line.
The problem with the Core line was that although they were competitively priced, they had a major performance issue: small file write latency. The problem manifested itself in system-wide stuttering during disk intensive multitasking. It wouldn’t take a lot to make those drives stutter, and until that article went live, everyone assumed that the problem was Windows, the disk controller, or something else.
I placed the blame on the drives and Ryan wasn’t all too happy."
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738/18
OCZ can not go away soon enough. It is Intel that made SSDs what they are now (both brought down price, increased IO and reliability with their first offering)
LtGoonRush - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
Ding dong the witch is dead. OCZ's decision to pair Sandforce controllers with garbage flash memory is primarily responsible for the unjustified bad reputation Sandforce drives have in some communities. (Yeah Sandforce's firmware should have handled the high error rate better, but you shouldn't make SSDs with known-defective NAND.)Guspaz - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
Intel's Sandforce drives have a perfectly good reliability record, and Apple has been using Sandforce controllers in their notebooks for some time now without any major complaints.Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
Actually the Toshiba's SandForce based drives that Apple has used have had major issues and Apple has even announced a replacement program:http://www.apple.com/support/macbookair-flashdrive...
LtGoonRush - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
Those are also drives that shipped with RAISE error correction disabled. I think the idea that RAISE wasn't required for consumer drives was put to bed quite some time ago.LtGoonRush - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
I feel like I should defend this a bit. Pointing out that Apple/Toshiba shipped Sandforce drives that were recalled was good criticism, and in theory the built-in ECC should be able to handle the error rates of good quality NAND without needing RAISE. There's also no evidence that RAISE would have helped in any way with the issues Apple/Toshiba SSDs experienced. However, I think it's telling that every other NAND manufacturer (Intel and SanDisk) and the brands that position for quality (Corsair, Mushkin) shipped ONLY drives with RAISE enabled. The companies shipping drives with RAISE disabled were largely new or fly-by-nights, with some big low-end brands (Kingston, ADATA)...and Apple/Toshiba. I doubt this was the only choice they made that affected the reliability of these devices.iwod - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
Interesting. Do you have any good guess as to why Apple/Toshiba decided to disable RAISE?Kristian Vättö - Thursday, November 28, 2013 - link
Likely to match the capacity. RAISE-enabled SSDs are 120GB, 240GB, 480GB... while the Samsung and SanDisk SSDs that Apple also uses are 256GB and 512GB (Toshiba only used in 64GB and 128GB flavors). It might have caused confusion and would have been bad for marketing, especially as Apple doesn't like to talk about the components in detail.edwardhchan - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
Wow, good thing I just RMA'd my latest defective drive in time :P Yeah, gonna start retiring the OCZ sandforce drives for good now I guess.BrianTho2010 - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
Farewell OCZ. There are/were a lot of great guys there who really worked hard to provide great products. Back in the DDR1 days they were one of the big supporters of over clocking and helped to develop memory over clocking theory. They will be missed.eanazag - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
Reliability was a reason I stayed away from their drives.What happens to PC Power & Cooling? OCZ owns them too. I have a PS from them and would buy more from them. I'm very happy with what I have gotten from PC Power & Cooling. There is no reason they should go under with the OCZ ship.
Eletriarnation - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
Yeah, I'd be curious to know that too. PCP&C is a pretty venerable brand as components go, I remember reading a book ten years ago where the author swore by their units. I had been concerned that their quality might drop off when they got bought but I haven't heard much about them since that.bobbozzo - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
PCP&C sell great products, but most of them are designed and/or manufactured by SeaSonic.I bought one fairly recently because it was a good fit for an odd HTPC case I have and it was cheaper than a similar SeaSonic-branded PSU.
If PCP&C go under, they will be missed, somewhat.
althaz - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
Manufactured - yes, but frequently not designed (although IMO the Seasonic designed stuff is better, which is why I own exclusively their PSUs).I won't miss OCZ overly (though they made good RAM), but PCP&C will definitely be missed.
Communism - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
Every single stick of ram I have purchased from them, as well as every single stick my friends have purchased from them have been defective (obviously on purpose) and corrupted our installs innumerable times.They shouldn't just die, they should be banned from existing.
Communism - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
After that experience, the only RAM I and my friends purchase is Crucial (Micron).Non-ram manufacturers don't care enough about their reputation enough not to screw you over and over and over.
I made the exact same recommendation back in the day when Sandforce came out for people to use Crucial (Micron) drives because they also make the memory chips for those drives.
The people who didn't listen got screwed over and over by their defective drives.
Traum - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
Sad to see one of the SSD pioneers going bankrupt. I know lots of people have had issues with their stuff, but almost since the company's inception, I've had various products from them in my PCs, and enjoyed nothing but good prices and solid performance.Communism - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
I hope the shit brand stays dead.They have only ever screwed over customers.
Good Riddance if no one buys them.
icrf - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
I have a 60 GB Vertex 2 and a 120 GB Vertex 3. No real complaints about either, and both are still in service and functioning well. I never had any of the oft reported reliability issues. I'm sad to see them go.sutamatamasu - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
hope fortoshiba to buy ocz. ocz have
own controller and toshiba
have a own nand. hope can
macth samsung and sandforce duopoli.
Quindor - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
Sad to see them go, although there was a lot of bad press surrounding them, not all of it was deserved. I have 4 OCZ SSD's still in use (1xVertex1, 3xVertex2) and they have all performed admirably from the day I got them. They just have a guide on how to use them, but so did all First and Second generation SSD controllers. Overprovisioning people, it's important for many reasons, especially with these older controllers!Anyway, sad to see them go, let's hope the good people working there get some job security soon by a company (toshiba?) taking them over.
Jackyshadow - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
I bought an OCZ Vertex 2 120GB couple of years ago. It performed significantly worse than all the hardware review results online. After lots of digging around, it turns out my Vertex was a secret 'revision' which they used less NAND chips ( but more capacity per NAND to keep the same stroage capacity) to cut cost, even though it means they are shipping a by-design slower product under the same banner. On top of that, it died after about 16 months.I was never going to buy another OCZ product again.
chrcoluk - Thursday, December 19, 2013 - link
yeah common problem I feel. Seen various reports like yours for different hardware such as graphics cards and motherboards. This highlights a problem with the review system. 90% of reviews seem to get free hardware supplied from the vendor, the vendor is likely to send them superior hardware to what is in retail. So there is immediate problems, (a) the product isnt a retail model and (b) the reviewer wants to maintain good relations so can get future free products. Also there is what you just mentioned that often early production runs are betetr quality than later runs because the company only needs good feedback in the early weeks, then later on when the attentions is removed from the product the components get silently changed round.My personal experience was with my asus motherboard which I am still using now. It turns out the usb3 ports believe it or not are hardwired to the usb2 controller, I have 4 spare boards of the same model, when I discovered the problem I tested the other 3 and they all had the same problem. The other 3 were still on shipped bios, the one I am using on new bios, I got no idea if this was fixable via bios (since I believe the ports were hardwired to bth usb2 and usb3 but were changed via bios config) as asus refused to look into it citing that the board is too old, out of warranty etc. This left a sour taste in my mouth as I wont give a company more money who thinks they only need to fix new product's (probably to stop bad PR damaging sales). My point is that not a single reviewer of the board I have tested the usb3 ports. Because when it was released was no usb3 devices so I guess none of them felt the need to (or they did test, found same issue but censored it). My guess is every board hipped of my model had the same fault.
Penti - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
Just let Doug Dodson take over his old PC Power & Cooling again.There is nothing to gain for Toshiba here. They already makes their own (branded) controllers and firmware, they do pretty well there, and ever body that stayed in Korea from the Indilinx-team got sacked when they closed the offices there about a year ago or switched companies on their own. Including going over to Toshiba. Most of the key US-based people left too. They really don't want any of their almost 600 employees. Certainly not their product base. Buying Barefoot-3 IP would make no sense either. There just can't be that many US and UK based people involved in that any more, and nobody needs to buy the company to hire the talent. I'm pretty sure nobody needs 300 administrators either.
extide - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
Well apparently Toshiba thinks it makes sense, or they wouldn't be making a bid to buy OCZ's assets.Penti - Thursday, November 28, 2013 - link
They could still walk away from a deal as they haven't agreed on terms, what and price yet. Or they could just bid on the patents and walk away. It's really up to the court proceedings. It's not that they can say ok just take the firm to Toshiba as they have not agreed to do such a thing. Obviously they don't want 600 new employees, their product line and 300 administrative/support staff. PCP&C should obviously be sold off to Mr Dodson again, so he can take over his old firm and run it like before the OCZ buyout. Toshiba has no interest in taking over all their business or products, and even if they wanted the few remaining Barefoot-3 staff that's just a tiny fraction of the business, and they could probably just hire the people instead of spending money on buying liquidated assets.Point is, is that it doesn't really matter if all of OCZ goes, engineers have or will find other jobs and the only part that is interesting is PCP&C, and not that they sell SSDs some OEM builds for them or that they have (had) a few guys doing the Barefoot controller and software.
Toshiba seems to do fine by selling nand for eMMC, third party SandForce and Marvell users or their own Marvell-derived with their own firmware SSD-drives to lots of customers. Micron has no fully custom controller either. SK Hynix has LAMD, Intel only uses their own controllers in Enterprise. Samsung has theirs. Companies like Seagate, WD, or OEMs still need to turn to companies like Toshiba which can offer a ready drive for them. Companies like Lite-on (Plextor) needs to buy their solution from somewhere. Plextor-drives uses Toshiba NAND with Marvell for that matter. If Lite-On wants the barefoot-controller they can just buy it from OCZ and start developing their own silicon for that matter. Sandisk which is a partner in the Toshiba NAND-fabs uses their own Marvell-solution too. It's not like Barefoot seems to fill any role.
RaistlinZ - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
Still using my 120GB Vertex 2 I bought in 2010. No issues with it.jiffylube1024 - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
Hmm... I guess a few bad quarters killed them? They seemed to be doing well; although the Agility/Vertex 1/2/3 generations were failure prone, they seemed to improve as time went on and they were very popular for a time.I guess the fact that everyone has been going with Intel/Samsung/Crucial for reliability and OCZ's reputation as the least reliable SSD manufacturer was their undoing?
Not to mention their unfocused product lineup - in addition to the Agility, Vertex and unnecessary "Solid" series they had a new Vector lineup with their in-house Indilinx controller that was never very clearly marketed to consumers. Samsung got it right IMO with two products - their regular TLC lineup (840 & EVO) and the "Pro" series. No need for 4+ different lineups with all sorts of different memory configurations. Just build one or two models and make them reliable!
lmcd - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
Hopefully Toshiba acquires the entirety of OCZ's assets and pursues the SSD market with OCZ's ferocity with an increased emphasis in power consumption.Assimilator87 - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
Ah, so sad to see them go. They were always on the cutting edge of RAM and made some amazing products.Chugworth - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
Well that's too bad. I love my 512GB Vertex 4. I've had it for over a year now with no issues at all. I can't really say the news comes as a surprise though with all the competition in the SSD business.iwod - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
Well it was a tough market to be in to begin with. I have no idea why they went all in on this. Since it was only a matter of time the NAND manufacture step in the SSD game. Samsung done this alone with Intel/Micron.Intel has the reliability reputation. I think there goes 40% of the market. Then there are those cost conscious. And you can never win those who make their own NAND. There goes another 40% of the market. ( 40% are just imaginary numbers for argument ).
So they are effectively competing for the 20% market against all other players. OEM like Apple will be making their own SSD, The PC market is rapdily shrinking, adding their recent problems with SSD drives.
It seems fate has been decided for them a long while ago
Penti - Thursday, November 28, 2013 - link
OEM's like Apple will just like every other OEM contract out the SSD, even when they use special (custom) connectors. Even though they bought anobit they don't do SSD-controllers. Thus Samsung is their main supplier now, they have been using SanDisk, and Toshiba too before but they are left out now when they have no PCIe solution available at the moment.Intel began using their own controllers, their consumer stuff don't any more. Samsung has been doing their own since they entered the game, and SK Hynix has bought LAMD which is pretty decent. Toshiba already has a custom Marvell controller (Toshiba-branded) and their own firmware which works great. WD/HGST bought sTEC, Seagate got their own SAS-SSD controller by now. SanDisk, Lite-on and possibly a few others prefers Marvell at the moment. Crucial/Micron does go the Marvell/custom-firmware route. Toshiba would probably be worse of with Barefoot from OCZ.
Plus the idea that Apple could turn away from sourcing Samsung when they always saves Apple is ridiculous. When they have monitor (panel) problems with their other 2-3 suppliers they always source and turn to Samsung for higher volumes, they still manufacturing all their SoCs, provide a lot of DRAM and NAND (eMMC), and now they are the only ones providing PCIe SSD's for Apple's machines. Samsung is one of three major DRAM suppliers now that Micron has taken over Elpida. Also they supply most of the battery cells to customers like Apple. Industrial conglomerates can do stuff. NAND is basically split between IM Flash (Intel/Micron), Samsung, Toshiba and SK Hynix, with SanDisk getting a share out of Toshiba's plants and doing stuff like their own eMMC memory. It's not a Samsung v Intel case there.
Kristian Vättö - Thursday, November 28, 2013 - link
SanDisk does have a PCIe solution, which is used by Apple ;)Penti - Thursday, November 28, 2013 - link
Ah wait your right, it has been used in Macbook Airs among others, I simply didn't remember even though I'm sure I saw it in tear downs and it's the Marvell 88SS9183 so they are not alone but they might actually use Samsung DRAM on the SanDisk ones :) That choice is SanDisk's own and they use both SK Hynix and Samsung DRAM on those that I've seen pictures of. Right now Marvell or Samsung is pretty much the only controller choice you got. When it comes to PCIe client-devices already out. I guess only Apple knows who they will source the most from though. Toshiba could supply them with the same any way. I guess they could source from Lite-on too. I guess Toshiba is still busy floggin their own branded version without DRAM, aka their SATA-based M.2 drive. Only a matter of time before we see A-data M.2 PCIe drives, and so on and others in the wild too. Any way, Sony seems to have gone Korean and use XP941 in systems like Sony Vaio Pro. But that is just one other thing to speak against trying to do something with Barefoot-3, the Toshiba/SanDisk-NAND already does PCIe M.2/Apple-drives with bothering with Indilinx/PLX-IP.HappyCracker - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
How many remember them from back in the Pentium 2/3 days? I think even then, they had a reputation for unreliably shipping RAM that was supposed to be great for those that actually had it arrive. Much credit to them for turning around some years later and creating the first decent SSD that produced consistent performance against the Super Talent/JMicron drives of the day (and Anand, of course).klmccaughey - Thursday, November 28, 2013 - link
Sad day. They always went above and beyond to help, really did shake up the consumer flash market (on price too) and were a thoroughly nice bunch of guys with a dream, trying extra hard to make it happen.I have two OCZ Vertex 3's in Raid 0 for my main C drive and never, not once, had an issue. I think it has been nearly two years now as well.
klmccaughey - Thursday, November 28, 2013 - link
OR Vertex 2's?3ogdy - Thursday, November 28, 2013 - link
Well,I am one of those who contributed to this. Ever since I understood OCZ's ideology("to hell with reliabilty,we just want awesome performance numbers") I constantly avoided their products and always replaced any OCZ SSD in systems I configure on the Internet.I'm both glad and sorry they ended up like this. I'm glad because they deserved it,given how awful a lot of their products were. I'm sorry because there's less competition in the market.
Kiste - Thursday, November 28, 2013 - link
My second (!) replacement Vertex 2 died a few months ago, so that's a total 3 of these pieces of crap that died on me. Good riddance, OCZ. You won't be missed.Arnulf - Thursday, November 28, 2013 - link
"It's hard to say what ultimately killed OCZ"No it's not; their shoddy products is what killed them. I was stupid enough to buy their SSD and PSU. Once that SSD died about 40 days after the purchase I fortunately got a full refund from the store (which went towards the purchase of Samsung's 830 series SSD), and as for the "ModXStream pro" PSU I had to take that damn thing apart and stick some bits under the plastic foil that covers section of the exhaust just to get rid of the unbearable noise, because some idiot thought this noise would be a great design feature.
I wowed to never buy another OCZ product again and it appears that this manifested sooner (and in a different way) than I ever imagined :-)
Good riddance OCZ, you will not be missed!
MrCommunistGen - Thursday, November 28, 2013 - link
As soon as I heard the announcement I started to wonder who'd buy them... or rather, who'd buy their IP.DarkStryke - Thursday, November 28, 2013 - link
Who will AT.com cheer-lead for with ocz gone?Animebando - Thursday, November 28, 2013 - link
I must be the only person to have owned desktop memory and a few different ssd from OCZ and have had zero issues. Ever.ExarKun333 - Thursday, November 28, 2013 - link
Apparently folks here are too young too remember. Platinum rev. 2 DDR RAM from OCZ was the gold standard for years. They made some pretty awesome high-voltage DDR stuff too. Those were the days...BillB0B - Friday, November 29, 2013 - link
OCZ has been trying to get loans to stay afloat for the last several months. There was some problem with there last CEO. That why it pay to use forum like this and other before you spent your hard earned money. There 3 and 5 year warrant don't mean much once they filed bankruptcy.mapesdhs - Saturday, November 30, 2013 - link
It's funny how peoples' experiences vary. I have more than thirty OCZ SSDs, not
a single issue with any of them so far (ranges from 60GB V2E to vector 256GB
and Vertex4 512GB, all sorts inbetween, including a dozen MAX IOPS 120s).
Oddly enough, the only OCZ product I bought which I didn't like was a PSU,
ever since which I've stuck to Thermaltake Toughpower.
As someone said earlier though, back in the DDR2 days I had some OCZ 800MHz
kits and they worked very well.
To me it's sad. Their early policies were obviously not good as regards product
reliability, but I think they learned from that and since then the models from the
Vertex4 onwards have been good. I have several Vectors, V4s, etc. What it
really means now is less competition, which is a real shame given the equivalent
state of affairs elsewhere in the world of PC components.
Ian.
zyky - Saturday, November 30, 2013 - link
I currently own and use multiple OCZ SSDs, DIMMs, power supplies, and even used niche market items like the DDR-Booster and haven't had a single issue with them. It was sad seeing them ditch memory production when being one of the top vendors for high speed RAM. Once they went from being the premier SandForce vendor who had special access to firmware to using Marvell and Indilinx IP, my love affair pretty much ended. Unless other vendors start producing controllers with write amplification less than one, I'll only ever buy SandForce based drives, performance be damned. Thus, I certainly had no plans of supporting OCZ much in the future.semo - Sunday, December 1, 2013 - link
"It's sad to see OCZ going because they've been one of the pioneers in the consumer SSD industry." Not true. OCZ Core was a terrible product. We now know it was Jmicron at fault but OCZ weren't trying to fix anything. Intel's X25M was the game changer and forced SSD makers to stop releasing overpriced crap. I still remember OCZ trying to sell Vertex 1s for the same price as X25Ms. Bunch greedy idiotsdananski - Sunday, December 1, 2013 - link
That's quite sad. I've liked my OCZ products (even the ones that have had firmware bugs) but I especially liked reading about what the company were up to. As a smaller company they were able to keep changing their way of doing things to try to keep ahead. From this news, I suppose taking those risks hasn't always paid off.My DDR2 Reapers are still going strong after all this time.
rrinker - Wednesday, December 4, 2013 - link
Never used anything OCZ except memory, it always worked - and it still working several years later, int he builds I used it in. But I don't try any extreme overclocks, especially with memory. In fact, of the last 5 systems I built, only the most current one has RAM from someone else, only because the 16GB kit I got was cheaper from someone other than OCZ at the time. One stored away, one is my server which has been on 24/7 for 3 years now, one is my previous desktop which is used regularly, and the other is an Atom box runnign Linux which controls my model railroad, and is used infrequently, lets of power on/off cycles.After seeing the reviews here, I wasn;t about to buy an OCZ SSD. The Kingstons in two of my older computers plus the Samsung in my most recent have been extremely reliable. The only OCZ Flash anything I have are a couple of 4GB USB sticks that came as promos, one with the RAM and one I think came with a power supply. They too work fine
rrinker - Wednesday, December 4, 2013 - link
Also isn't it ironic, the banner ad at the top of the page while posting this is for a Vector 150....soccerplayer88 - Monday, December 9, 2013 - link
Too bad. I've got two OCZ Vertex3 120GB SSD's in a RAID0.Not a single problem for the past 2-3 years. Perhaps I was one of the lucky ones.
Laphaswiff - Monday, December 9, 2013 - link
Ἑρμοκράτης ὁ Συρακοσίων στρατηγός, οὗτος ὁ νικήσας Ἀθηναίους, εἶχε θυγατέρα Καλλιρόην τοὔνομα, θαυμαστόν τι χρῆμα παρθένου καὶ ἄγαλμα τῆς ὅλης Σικελίας. (1,1,2) ἦν γὰρ τὸ κάλλος οὐκ ἀνθρώπινον ἀλλὰ θεῖον, οὐδὲ Νηρηίδος ἢ Νύμφης τῶν ὀρειῶν ἀλλ' αὐτῆς Ἀφροδίτης Παρθένου. φήμη δὲ τοῦ παραδόξου θεάματος πανταχοῦ διέτρεχε καὶ μνηστῆρες κατέρρεον εἰς Συρακούσας, δυνάσται τε καὶ παῖδες τυράννων, οὐκ ἐκ Σικελίας μόνον, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐξ Ἰταλίας καὶ Ἠπείρου καὶ ἐθνῶν τῶν ἐν ἠπείρῳ. (1,1,3) ὁ δὲ Ἔρως ζεῦγος ἴδιον ἠθέλησε συμπλέξαι. Χαιρέας γάρ τις ἦν μειράκιον εὔμορφον, πάντων ὑπερέχον, οἷον Ἀχιλλέα καὶ Νιρέα καὶ Ἱππόλυτον καὶ Ἀλκιβιάδην πλάσται τε καὶ γραφεῖς ἀποδεικνύουσι, πατρὸς Ἀρίστωνος τὰ δεύτερα ἐν Συρακούσαις μετὰ Ἑρμοκράτην φερομένου. καί τις ἦν ἐν αὐτοῖς πολιτικὸς φθόνος ὥστε θᾶττον ἂν πᾶσιν ἢ ἀλλήλοις ἐκήδευσαν. (1,1,4) φιλόνεικος δέ ἐστιν ὁ Ἔρως καὶ χαίρει τοῖς παραδόξοις κατορθώμασιν· ἐζήτησε δὲ τοιόνδε τὸν καιρόν.