They lied to their customers by selling hardware under the same name as previously produced hardware with cheaper components and lesser specs.
They built hardware that was simply off-spec, an example being drives where the connectors were an entire millimeter shifted, such that when installed in certain machines the connectors literally could not make contact with the corresponding metal.
They built drives with extreme speeds while entirely sacrificing longevity and reliability.
At best they had a great marketing department that made it possible for them to peddle their crap to the public for so long.
I'm glad to see them go.
Edit:
For those who must have numbers, return statistics:
Probably the best thing you can say about OCZ is that they played a huge role in establishing the consumer SSD market.
Their original Vertex series had its rough edges but was a real breakthrough - they were the first to really push a "modern" SSD controller in the form of the Indilinx Barefoot. At the time, most other SSD drives on the market used horrible JMicron flash controllers that were more suitable for your camera's memory card; they were not really designed to cope with the traffic a desktop operating system would throw at them.
Back in the Vertex/Vertex2 days they really were the ones to beat for the most part. But then Intel came along with their incredibly stable SSDs and frankly, OCZ's drives started to seem like toys.
Part of OCZ's problem is that, starting with the Vertex 2 era, dozens of other companies used Sandforce controllers just like OCZ did. At that point OCZ obviously tried to compete on price and we can see what it did to their quality. To their credit, they made a really commendable last stab at relevance when they bought Indilinx so they could have their own custom controller and (maybe?) stop competing on price. Those drives got some great reviews although I don't know if they were reliable or what.
> They lied to their customers by selling hardware under the same name as previously produced hardware with cheaper components and lesser specs
I was hoping someone would bring this up. When shopping around for SSD drives a year or so ago, I stumbled upon stories about this and simply couldn't believe that a company would do something like that.
Basically, you'd read some reviews (with benchmarks) about OCZ drives. Then you would go and purchase the exact specific type that the reviewer had — and the hardware inside would be different (inferior). There was no way to check this without opening the drive up or measuring with benchmarks.
This was the moment I decided I would never buy anything from OCZ, as I can't do business with a company that lies to me. I am glad they are going away.
> They built drives with extreme speeds while entirely sacrificing longevity and reliability.
You don't say. One example being the OCZ RevoDrives.
Our company investigated replacing our traditional HDDs with SSDs and with RevoDrives to see how that impacted our build-times and development efficiency.
Almost every second user who received a RevoDrive experienced critical data-failures and 100% data-loss.
What they didn't say on the package WITH CAPITAL LETTERS was that it was a RAID0/JBOD of SSDs with zero redundancy. If one drive failed (and they did) you lost all your data with no means of recovery.
We could have asked for replacement units because they were still under warranty (some as new as 2 months), but needless to say, we weren't very eager on more drives from OCZ.
If the rest of their product line-up was like this, I can't say I'm too surprised about them not making it for the long run.
I'm not sure it's so bad. I bought my OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 2.5 years ago, it's been great and I'm still happy with it. They also have had many good reviews.
Those numbers are actually incredibly skewed and not very accurate - I can confidently say that a large amount of the returns in the Vertex 2/3 and Agility 2/3 lines were due to firmware problems which were fixed very early on. Customers simply didn't understand that upgrading firmware was not optional, and the support team was not large/capable enough to teach this to every customer. Many of the drives which were returned were simply re-flashed to the new firmware and sent back, working perfectly.
"They built drives with extreme speeds while entirely sacrificing longevity and reliability." This is so true, I had their SSD before, and it broken ==> I lost most of my data in that drive...
We had about 40 OCZ drives (Vertex 2/3/3 Max IOPS) and 6 of them failed. Our 8 Vertex 3 Max IOPS were in RAID 5 for a huge calculations which didn't require reliability but wrote a lot of data and therfore we tried to save time with this experimental RAID. The RAID was fine for about a couple of month and seeing almost 3 GB/s throughput was mindblowing. But suddenly we we saw drives randomly failing. But the drives did not completly fail, we were able to rebuild the RAID with the same hard drive. We did that a couple of times until we thought it was too much hassle and used the drives somewhere else. Now we are buying Crucial M4s and they are totally fine. In the first place a hard drive must be reliable.
This was a firmware bug originating from the Sandforce firmware which the releases were based on - I think this one was completely fixed at least 8 months ago.
I wasn't aware of it before reading into this whole story, but OCZ seemed to have quite a problem with QA. My vertex 2 barely lasted a year before it started going funny, which I put down to bad luck. But now it seems I wasn't the only one.
They are notorious for pushing out low quality products. You really should be a more informed consumer before you buy stuff, it's not like it takes a long time to research this kind of stuff.
I have OCZ drives in a couple of my machines, all of which are at least a year old. I'd heard bad things about OCZ, but I didn't realize their reputation was that shot. I'm wondering if I should replace my drives, or if the bathtub curve is in full effect here and I've dodged a bullet...
With regards to other brands, I spent some time at the startup where I used to work putting together manufacturing PCs meant for programming serial numbers into devices, assembled from Intel SSDs, cheap Foxconn nettop computers, and the cheapest sticks of RAM we could find. I must have put together around 15 or so of those machines, and although a lot of them failed due to factory conditions/rough handling/power cuts, I don't think any of the Intel drives ever broke down.
> I'm wondering if I should replace my drives, or if the bathtub curve is in full effect here\
You should back them up, but you should do that regardless of the drive manufacturer. Replacing working drives won't likely gain you anything except a lighter wallet. As you mentioned, you're "in the bathtub" now, and a newer drive is probably more likely to fail. Maintain good backups and replace the drives if/when they fail.
Personally, I have had 3 different Revodrives, all of which have failed. The last one I sent in, and asked to get a more reliable disk back, and I got a Vector. So far so good. Keep away from Revodrives.
If you're a fan of conference calls, then you probably already know that OCZ isn't in the same rosy position it has been in years past. Fortunately, its enterprise-oriented offerings are really helping the company's bottom line. But the situation is darker on the desktop. It's still in the position of needing to source NAND from the fabs manufacturing it, which means it's paying more for the flash it uses and perhaps unable to ship as many units as it'd like.
But again, if you listen to earnings calls, you might already know all of this.
However, a long string of failures across several of its product lines (most notably the high-performance Vertex family) took a lot of the shine off of OCZ's name
Although only anecdotal, we ditched OCZ at my last company because of their high failure rate; never risked going back. No such issue with Intel or others
In the early SSD days, I only heard two adjectives to describe OCZ drives - "fastest" and "unstable". It was inevitable the latter would catch up to them.
The one thing that will kill a hardware company much faster than a software company is managing supply chain and inventory costs. I don't know the full backstory of OCZ other than seeing how the SSD segment of the storage industry has gone and the prices have obviously gone a lot lower and are more competitive. Depending on how OCZ managed their production, it would be very easy to be left holding the bag on millions of dollars of inventory. Unless you have billions in the bank, that's enough to sink a company every time.
In addition to OCZ's reliability issues, it must have been tough to compete on price with companies like Samsung and Intel that fab their own flash memory.
I wonder why Toshiba wants OCZ given Toshiba is already making SSD themselves and been doing fine. As someone has already mentioned down below, OCZ to me was a RAM company before they sold first SSD. Is Toshiba trying to compete in the SSD market too? I thought Samsung and Intel were pretty much the winners in this market. If OCZ exist because of quality, what can Toshiba can get out of the acquisition? The factory? The machines? The top engineers?
I remember them being something other than an SSD manufacturer. I've got a few sticks of DDR memory from them. In fact I was surprised to see them producing flash memory products lately (for a very long definition of lately).
I have avoided them since I started buying SSDs because I associate their brand with Sandforce controllers, and I associate Sandforce controllers with drive failure.
Whether these associations are informed by and backed by data or not, they are among the points that steered me into the arms of Intel and Samsung for my SSD needs.
I associate their brand with Sandforce controllers, and I
associate Sandforce controllers with drive failure.
Whether these associations are informed by and backed
by data or not, they are among the points that steered me
into the arms of Intel and Samsung
All other things being equal (quality of NAND, workload, etc) the NAND on Sandforce drives will last longer because of their write compression. Of course, most drives will be replaced or retired before that point anyway.
I think Sandforce had a bit of a bad rap for a while because they were the go-to controller for brands like OCZ who competed on price. Their actual silicon is great. In the hands of a manufacturer like Intel (or even OWC - not to be confused with OCZ) who puts quality and stability first, Sandforce controllers really shine.
However, Intel seems to have a more thorough QA team than the other companies. They made a lot of changes to the SF-2281 firmware before they accepted it for their drives. And then after it shipped, they discovered an AES-256 bug that every other manufacturer missed for over a year.
I had a OCZ petrol drive that failed recently, it was just over a year old, but have had a vertex drive in another macbook pro that's still alive after 2 years. I just try and back up regularly. I'm surprised at the bankruptcy but they did have huge problems, their forums were inundated with issues.
This is upsetting as we are moving towards a tech world filled with only a few big brands. Will we only be able to buy SSDs from Intel or Samsung in the future? Time will tell, but I am upset that the small guy can't compete in this space anymore.
I would definitely expect the market to vertically integrate so that most SSDs are made by NAND vendors. That would mostly leave us with Samsung, Intel, Micron, and Toshiba.
But by the time the SSD market becomes totally boring PCM may arrive...
I'm glad I stuck with Intel ssds even though they eventually switched to SandForce I have drives with both controllers and they are both awesome. I almost bought an OCZ but they were garbage especially now Samsung is a player.
When I got my first SSD over a year ago, I bought a 250gb OCZ Agility 3 drive. Not knowing about the very high drive failure rate. It died last week, completely without warning.
I don't understand why in the world would you spend more money on a new drive - if you only bought that drive a year ago you could have it replaced under warranty. Even if it only works for another year, it's still infinitely better(in my mind) than spending money on a new drive.
I own a vertex 3, never had an issue with it going on 2 years. It is used in an osx laptop that is used aggressively for devops work. Guess I got one of the good ones...
good. I picked up a 30GB ssd on eBay that was NIB for like 30 bucks and it failed while installing arch linux. I contacted the seller and he happily refunded me. That was my first experience with OCZ as I have always used Intel or Kingston SSD.
[+] [-] Mithaldu|12 years ago|reply
They were never great.
They lied to their customers by selling hardware under the same name as previously produced hardware with cheaper components and lesser specs.
They built hardware that was simply off-spec, an example being drives where the connectors were an entire millimeter shifted, such that when installed in certain machines the connectors literally could not make contact with the corresponding metal.
They built drives with extreme speeds while entirely sacrificing longevity and reliability.
At best they had a great marketing department that made it possible for them to peddle their crap to the public for so long.
I'm glad to see them go.
Edit:
For those who must have numbers, return statistics:
http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=2&h...
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/911-7/ssd.html
[+] [-] JohnBooty|12 years ago|reply
Their original Vertex series had its rough edges but was a real breakthrough - they were the first to really push a "modern" SSD controller in the form of the Indilinx Barefoot. At the time, most other SSD drives on the market used horrible JMicron flash controllers that were more suitable for your camera's memory card; they were not really designed to cope with the traffic a desktop operating system would throw at them.
Back in the Vertex/Vertex2 days they really were the ones to beat for the most part. But then Intel came along with their incredibly stable SSDs and frankly, OCZ's drives started to seem like toys.
Part of OCZ's problem is that, starting with the Vertex 2 era, dozens of other companies used Sandforce controllers just like OCZ did. At that point OCZ obviously tried to compete on price and we can see what it did to their quality. To their credit, they made a really commendable last stab at relevance when they bought Indilinx so they could have their own custom controller and (maybe?) stop competing on price. Those drives got some great reviews although I don't know if they were reliable or what.
[+] [-] jwr|12 years ago|reply
I was hoping someone would bring this up. When shopping around for SSD drives a year or so ago, I stumbled upon stories about this and simply couldn't believe that a company would do something like that.
Basically, you'd read some reviews (with benchmarks) about OCZ drives. Then you would go and purchase the exact specific type that the reviewer had — and the hardware inside would be different (inferior). There was no way to check this without opening the drive up or measuring with benchmarks.
This was the moment I decided I would never buy anything from OCZ, as I can't do business with a company that lies to me. I am glad they are going away.
[+] [-] josteink|12 years ago|reply
You don't say. One example being the OCZ RevoDrives.
Our company investigated replacing our traditional HDDs with SSDs and with RevoDrives to see how that impacted our build-times and development efficiency.
Almost every second user who received a RevoDrive experienced critical data-failures and 100% data-loss.
What they didn't say on the package WITH CAPITAL LETTERS was that it was a RAID0/JBOD of SSDs with zero redundancy. If one drive failed (and they did) you lost all your data with no means of recovery.
We could have asked for replacement units because they were still under warranty (some as new as 2 months), but needless to say, we weren't very eager on more drives from OCZ.
If the rest of their product line-up was like this, I can't say I'm too surprised about them not making it for the long run.
[+] [-] jkbyc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielvinson|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] znowi|12 years ago|reply
They also chose the most susceptible target market - teen gamers and overclockers. "Being cool" is their mantra and OCZ delivered.
[+] [-] jotm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oahziur|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kabdib|12 years ago|reply
"My OCZ drive failed..." / "I'm on my fourth RMA, what should I do?"
"Real junkies buy Intel." (Or Samsung). And they don't buy TLC flash, either.
[+] [-] ek|12 years ago|reply
Nice to know they agree with the rest of us that Samsung is the way to go nowadays, too.
[+] [-] gogeek|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielvinson|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arprocter|12 years ago|reply
A year later and none of the replacement Intels have gone bad...
[+] [-] highace|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fletchowns|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] austinz|12 years ago|reply
With regards to other brands, I spent some time at the startup where I used to work putting together manufacturing PCs meant for programming serial numbers into devices, assembled from Intel SSDs, cheap Foxconn nettop computers, and the cheapest sticks of RAM we could find. I must have put together around 15 or so of those machines, and although a lot of them failed due to factory conditions/rough handling/power cuts, I don't think any of the Intel drives ever broke down.
[+] [-] dpark|12 years ago|reply
You should back them up, but you should do that regardless of the drive manufacturer. Replacing working drives won't likely gain you anything except a lighter wallet. As you mentioned, you're "in the bathtub" now, and a newer drive is probably more likely to fail. Maintain good backups and replace the drives if/when they fail.
[+] [-] TobbenTM|12 years ago|reply
Personally, I have had 3 different Revodrives, all of which have failed. The last one I sent in, and asked to get a more reliable disk back, and I got a Vector. So far so good. Keep away from Revodrives.
[+] [-] brownbat|12 years ago|reply
If you're a fan of conference calls, then you probably already know that OCZ isn't in the same rosy position it has been in years past. Fortunately, its enterprise-oriented offerings are really helping the company's bottom line. But the situation is darker on the desktop. It's still in the position of needing to source NAND from the fabs manufacturing it, which means it's paying more for the flash it uses and perhaps unable to ship as many units as it'd like.
But again, if you listen to earnings calls, you might already know all of this.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/vector-150-ssd-review,36...
[+] [-] volvelle|12 years ago|reply
Although only anecdotal, we ditched OCZ at my last company because of their high failure rate; never risked going back. No such issue with Intel or others
[+] [-] kalleboo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] programminggeek|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AmVess|12 years ago|reply
It's pretty hard to make money when you have to provide two products for the price of one. It went on for so long that it was scary.
[+] [-] JohnBooty|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yeukhon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsynnott|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jthol|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] J_Darnley|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrbill|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bhauer|12 years ago|reply
Whether these associations are informed by and backed by data or not, they are among the points that steered me into the arms of Intel and Samsung for my SSD needs.
[+] [-] JohnBooty|12 years ago|reply
All other things being equal (quality of NAND, workload, etc) the NAND on Sandforce drives will last longer because of their write compression. Of course, most drives will be replaced or retired before that point anyway.
I think Sandforce had a bit of a bad rap for a while because they were the go-to controller for brands like OCZ who competed on price. Their actual silicon is great. In the hands of a manufacturer like Intel (or even OWC - not to be confused with OCZ) who puts quality and stability first, Sandforce controllers really shine.
[+] [-] tanzam75|12 years ago|reply
However, Intel seems to have a more thorough QA team than the other companies. They made a lot of changes to the SF-2281 firmware before they accepted it for their drives. And then after it shipped, they discovered an AES-256 bug that every other manufacturer missed for over a year.
[+] [-] chrismcband|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisblackwell|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmf|12 years ago|reply
But by the time the SSD market becomes totally boring PCM may arrive...
[+] [-] wil421|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anons2011|12 years ago|reply
Bought a Samsung SSD to replace it.
[+] [-] gambiting|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mankypro|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jackmaney|12 years ago|reply
Good riddance.
[+] [-] broknbottle|12 years ago|reply