Is OCZ On Its Last Legs?

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You know things are bad when people start writing "are they dead yet?" articles about you.

It's never an encouraging sign when a company whose product you use is in trouble, but it happens to all of us. This week came the latest evidence that SSD maker OCZ Technologies is in serious trouble as its sales have collapsed.
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It definitely sucks for them when their brand name is synonymous with trash.

I'm surprised they've managed to keep the ship afloat this long...

Perhaps a new company name would help? ;)
 
With the rate of failures I've read, I'm not surprised. Previous employer purchased 6 OCZ SSDs of varying capacity. When I left the company four of the drives had bit the dust. Replacements were received but I.T. would not install them in any machine due to trust issues with the drives and brand.
 
I must be a rare case of having zero issues with their SSD drives for the last few years. Granted I have only bought six or so drives. I have stopped buying them.
 
Have had two drives fail on me. Replaced them with Intel. Brand has been trash to me ever since. Businesses that make crap should fail.
 
Have bout 6 drives from them personally, only the first had an issue which was fixed promptly by one of their senior SSD engineers himself. Of the companies I have worked with, I have witnessed and used about 20 OCZ SSD drives, only 2 issues from those. Of my friends that have bought OCZ SSD drives, of which that is about another 15, I haven't heard of any issues. But I guess we are just the lucky ones...
 
I have three of their early 30 gig ssd's and some DDR2 ram from them. They all still work, but I'm not likely to purchase from them again, even if they were thriving still.

Price was ok, but not quite the performance that I could get from other brands.
 
Last time I bought an OCZ SSD was the Vertex. Not Vertex 3, but the very first, very slow Vertex. It hasn't failed, but man was it slow, like below rating slow. Never bought from OCZ again.
 
With all the controversy that they started out with back in the early 2000s, it's a surprise they've lasted this long.
 
I have only ever used OCZ RAM and a PSU in a non-critical system. With all the bad press OCZ got with their SSDs, I chose not to touch them especially after reading an article on return rate of SSDs with data that came from a number of European distributors.

This data was just from the distributors so it didn't include end user return to OCZ and it was still something like 5 to 6%. May not sound like a lot but in comparison, acceptable range should be around 3% and Intel was under 1%.

I opted for Intel SSDs.
 
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Wow this sucks. I been an OCZ fan since 2003. I bought their ram, PSUs and SSDs. I haven't had a single issue out of them except for some DOA ram I received back in the DDR1 days but the RMA process was fantastic.
 
They grew too fast. They had success with reasonably proceed SSDs in their first Vertex line but the fiddly tweaks needed to set them up, partition offset, garbage collection, constant firmware updates etc, made them an enthusiast only offering.

Then everyone caught up. The moment Intel and Samsung got in the game they were doomed. They got a bit of a breather when Intel had their data killing bug, but that was short lived.

They could have ruled the stack of bottom feeder SSD IHVs. But they squandered their name with hastily lunched shit products.

I had five OCZ units. They are all dead.
 
Got shafted by OCZ with a mail in rebate on some low latency DDR ram so many years ago where they didn't have the money to cover the rebate.
Then when it just stopped working a month later, mailed in for an exchange and never got my ram back due to "limited supplies."
Should have stuck with Corsair and not tried to save that $20.
Goodbye and good riddance.
 
Never owned a OCZ SSD, but i have some of their ram, no complaints.

This forum did convince me to purchase an Intel SSD over the OCZ though...
 
All 6 of my OCZ Sata 2 and Sata 3 SF SSDs are still working just fine since I bought them. Oldest one is just a little past 2 years.

Nothing I buy ever breaks or not work properly so I don't have any grudge against any company. So I'm sad that OCZ is down on their lucks. One less company means one less competition and possible price increases. I hope they can get another round of investors and turn themselves around by making even better products to compete.
 
I have some DDR3 and two Vertex 3 SSD. All working great. My concern is that they also own PC Power & Cooling and all of my PSUs are from them.
 
I owned two kits of OCZ RAM and three OCZ power supplies, 100% failure rate on power supplies and 50% on RAM. Four out of five products had to go through RMA. When I bought my first SSD there was no way on earth I was buying more faulty OCZ landfill.

Nothing of value shall be lost.
 
I owned OCZ products which worked well and I always thought high of them.

I guess the article mentioned some supposed the shady practices so who knows but still...

I wish them success.
 
OCZ has been rock solid with almost every product they sell, in my experience as a PC builder and working for a gaming PC manufacturer.
Although their marketing has dropped to nil the last couple years. I have seen much more ad placement for Corsair, Kingston, and Samsung than OCZ.
 
The real question is are they going to take PC power and cooling down with them
 
I considered buying an OCZ SSD back when they had exclusivity with SandForce, but the overbearing denial, condescension, and arrogance from OCZ in its tech support forum was enough to make me swear off the brand. It will not be missed.
 
I had 3 OCZ SSD,

2, 90GB Agility2 and a 120GB Vertex 3.

The 90GB's still work to this day with no issues, the 120GB failed after a month but was replaced by OCZ. Which took 2 weeks. Not happy, after that failure I never got another from them.

I got Samsung 830 256GB and Crucial m4 128GB as replacements for a 90gb and the 120gb.
 
I honestly hate to see any company go. As it only hurts the end user in the end. I see a lot of OCZ bashing in here and the other threads. I'm sure if we look hard enough we can find faults with any company. The ram I had was good, some of the ssds had a lot of issues. Prices was cheap and everyone knew that when they bought them. Everything has its ups and downs though.
 
Probably because they don't stand behind their super faulty products. Everything I've ever purchased from them has failed.
 
OCZ has been about to die more times than I care to remember. If it wasn't some fiasco about RAM, then it's their cooler business, now their SSDs. One thing after another, after another. I hate to see PCP&C go down with the ship too.

Good riddance.
 
It started happening when Samsung came to the SSD market and seriously stepped up their game with the introduction of their 840 Series SSDs.

The 840 Series (non-Pro) is a perfect example of an SSD that delivers incredible performance numbers at a price point that us mere mortals could afford. Say what you will of the 840 Series (not EVO or PRO) being that it's cheap, it uses TLC NAND Flash, has less writes, etc. but it still is an amazing performer and has taken the SSD market by storm.

You have the 840 Series Pro and the 840 Series EVO lines and you have an SSD product line that appeals to those who just want to have better performance than a traditional HDD (840 Series) to the person who wants awesome performance (840 Series Pro and EVO). It's no wonder that Samsung has been so successful while others like OCZ have been slowing dying.
 
KILLER_K said:
I honestly hate to see any company go. As it only hurts the end user in the end. I see a lot of OCZ bashing in here and the other threads. I'm sure if we look hard enough we can find faults with any company. The ram I had was good, some of the ssds had a lot of issues. Prices was cheap and everyone knew that when they bought them. Everything has its ups and downs though.
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Yes there are faults with any company. However, many companies have many redeeming qualities about them that outweigh the bad or at least makes up for it. OCZ doesn't have enough of those redeeming qualities to outweigh the negativity around them (some of which I myself have spread). Either that or OCZ hasn't done a good job advertising/informing those redeeming qualities. Considering the massive drop in revenue as stated in the article, it looks like the negativity really is hurting OCZ.
 
OCZ ram has been perfect for all my machines.

SSD's not so good. Started with vertex 1 when it came out. Price was amazing half off an intel ssd. Eventually it died and it was replaced by ocz. Again died and replaced again. This one died after while and finally OCZ upgraded me to vertex 2. Used Vertex2 for about 2 years before it died. Bought a vertex 4 and it is still alive. Bought samsung 840 pros and will never go back. I think most of OCZ bashing comes from Vertex 3 bsod which every company had issues with. OCZ was only company who worked to get to the bottom of it, but a lot of people were pissed off and rightly so. Vertex 4 had misleading ads where they said infused with indillux when it was marvell (Still amazing ssd, people just felt betrayed). Then vertex 4 450 came out which was with their custom indillux controller which the 4 should of been. During vertex 3 days they were doing a lot of rebates to try and gain market share which got them into trouble.

Once Samsung 840 pros came out it was over for OCZ.
 
My OCZ PSU was great, and it sounds like their latest SSDs are actually pretty reliable. And their PCIe SSDs are some of the cheaper ones.
 
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