OCZ Technology Founder and CEO Resigns - game over for OCZ?

OCZ Technology CEO Resigns, Seen as Takeover Target - Businessweek

OCZ changes leaders, needs to solve supply chain problem - chicagotribune.com

Hopefully this company's (impending?) demise will mean a greater attention to customer support, and actually TESTING products (in particular storage solutions!) that end-users use, before putting them out to market. I've been bitten twice by OCZ SSDs malfunctioning and will never go down that path again - especially given the tone with which their staff communicates with their customers on their forums.

 

Their problem is mainly with the older Sandforce based controllers, their newer 3/4 series SSDs are pretty good.

 

Maybe Samsung or one of the last remaining HDD manufacturers will buy them.

My old Vertex drives are still running strong - (4) in total. Had one hiccup with a 60GB Vertex. The "no boot device found error" a few months ago after no issues for 2 years. Destructive flashed using the jumper method brought it back to life and it's been running since.

 

I don't see why samsung would buy them, when they would of bought their nand from samsung and samsung have their own controllers anyway.

 

This. I have used a handful of Agility 3/4 SSDs with no problems

 

Agreed, no reason for them to buy OCZ.

I don't follow OCZ, the company/stock at all but I wonder how much of is really due to a supply chain problem. I get dealnews price alerts for SSDs all the time and OCZ always comes up. It seems like they (and/or other low tier SSD drive makers) have been involved in a price war/race to the bottom. OCZ and a few of their others SSDs from companies I wouldn't waste my time w/always come up the cheapest.

It eventually forces Samsung 830, Crucial M4 and various Intel SSD prices down. I think Samsung would be happy if OCZ went under. It might slow down the price erosion.

It almost seems like OCZ (and a few others) prey upon people who don't know any better and are willing to chance it on the cheapest SSDs they can find.

 

The Vertex 3 and Agility 3 suffered from the infamous SF-2281 BSOD issue before a firmware fix was issued. OCZ refused to acknowledge the issue for a long time (so did SandForce) and they took a lot of flak for that.

 

OCZ also lied to customers by swapping NAND types for one of their Vertex drives without informing customers, and had to do an about-turn after initially wanting to charge customers for a swap! Insane really.

 

dang, they actually managed to build close to 100M cash flow ? ... I'm impressed.

 

Rumors this summer were that Seagate or Western Digital would probably buy OCZ.

But Samsung would be interested in it for OCZ's IP portfolio (patents). They learned a hard lesson from Apple that holding patents and being a patent troll pays. If Samsung got a hold of OCZ's IP, they could potentially use that against their competition and go on to dominate the flash memory market. Samsung sold the HDD business to Seagate for the purpose of concentrating on flash memory. Flash memory is the future. OCZ was a pioneer in the SSD segment. So their earlier IP would be valuable as it is likely broad based enough to launch patent disputes with the likes of Intel, WD, Corsair, etc. They could settle for licensing fees or go for broke and try to have certain "infringing" products pulled from the market.

 

I hope not - i don't want any OCZ tech polluting best most reliable SSDs currently on market.

 

It's not that the patents would be used for production. Rather, they would be used to entangle the competition.

 

Yet you're talking about Samsung here, not Apple with their full of xxxx way of doing business. On top of that whatever patents OCZ may have, it clearly didn't bring them to success using those, and I highly doubt that Samsung needs any of it as they have nice drives for sale already. So somebody could benefit from OCZ manufacturing facilities, but again I dont think Samsung needs that as well.

WD on the other hand tried to make SSD line what, an year ago as far as I remember, and that didn't go too well. And Seagate is already using flash media in some of their HDDs ..

 

With all the trouble OCZ is seeing today, maybe some or most of the issues came from themselves and not SandForce.