OCZ Files for Bankruptcy - Toshiba Offers to Buy the Assets
by Kristian Vättö on November 27, 2013 3:30 PM EST
OCZ has just issued a press release announcing their filing for bankruptcy, which was expected since Nasdaq had halted the trading of OCZ stock earlier today. OCZ has had financial issues for quite a long time and it was just a matter of time before the inevitable happened. While OCZ did try to change its course by reforming their product portfolio when Ryan Petersen, the former CEO of OCZ, stepped down, it seems that the efforts weren't enough to make the business profitable.
OCZ leaves behind a noticeable amount of assets, most importantly its engineering teams in California, South Korea and Great Britain thanks to the prior acquisitions of PLX and Indilinx. Toshiba has already offered to buy OCZ's assets but currently there is no certainty on whether the deal will be completed. Toshiba's offer is, as expected, subject to various conditions such as retention of the employees because it obviously makes no sense to buy the assets unless Toshiba also gets the immaterial capital that is integrated into the employees. We'll have to wait and see how the deal turns out but at this point I recommend not buying any OCZ products because there is no guarantee that warranties will be honored.
It's sad to see OCZ going because they've been one of the pioneers in the consumer SSD industry. They were one of the most active companies when we started to see the first consumer SSDs in 2008/2009 but OCZ lost a ton of sales once Samsung and other major OEMs began to take the consumer SSD market seriously. It's hard to say what ultimately killed OCZ without knowing their exact cost structure but I believe it was a combination of bad strategy (too many products and high production volumes) and engineering choices (low reliability) along with other things.
What happens to OCZ now depends on the completion of the Toshiba deal. Even if Toshiba completes the purchase of OCZ's assets, I doubt we'll see the OCZ brand anymore. OCZ's brand image took a hit with the low reliability, so I doubt Toshiba will see the OCZ brand adding any value to its products. I do hope that the deal goes through because OCZ's Indilinx Barefoot 3 platform has a lot of potential and it would be lamentable to see all that hard work to be flushed down the toilet.
Source: Nasdaq
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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.