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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  • 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. :)

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