back to article Foundering OCZ snatches megabuck lifeline in white-knuckled grip

OCZ, drowning in a sea of cancelled products, its banker missing overboard, revenues leaking from its deflating financial rubber ring and burdened by an inability to understand its own condition has been hurled a last minute $30 million cash and credit lifeline. The SSD startup company almost submerged under previous CEO and …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Let it drown....

    Let is drown, and then after the sharks eat the corpse, machine-gun the sharks.

  2. Tomas K.

    OCZ was a wing and prayer operation

    Their whole history has been one gimmick after another IMO with poor if any customer support for products of questionable quality. Unless the new CEO has some magic and they find a niche to fill, the cash will soon be gone because few businesses or consumers want to deal with an entity that may be out of business next week.

  3. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

    OCZ absolutely must do two things to survive:

    1) Make products that don't suck

    2) Convince the entire IT industry, all of whom have been badly burned by previous OCZ products that their extant line doesn't suck.

    That means making a product line with a very low failure rate and seeding those drives amongst relevant businesses, tech journos, "thought influencers" (read: respected bloggers within their IT niches) and so forth. It means being able to explain what is different about this round than the last and it means publicly admitting they fucked up. Without the admission, we can't believe they've changed. Without solid, third-party verification that their stuff isn't absolute crap anymore, we won't even consider buying their stuff.

    Sadly, based on my experience, the above is so completely against their corporate culture that these guys are just flat out doomed. Honesty and transparency are not their shtick. They would never back third-party analysis of their equipment when marketing and outright falsehoods could still be tried.

    I have no officially had over 80% of all OCZ SSDs (400 some odd at last count) seen in the field die on me. Samsung sits at about 4% (of 2000ish) and Sandisk hasn't had a loss in the admittedly low sample of 3 disks. MY 8 Kingston Hyper-X SSDs continue to soak up every bit of punishment I can throw at them with no failures, but its early days yet.

    But I have replaced one Intel drive out of over 8000 in the field. Intel 510s and 520s. 1 in over 8000. SSDs? Intel or bust, gentlemen. Intel or bust.

    1. MondoMan
      Thumb Up

      spot-on

      They've always pushed their products to the edge to get a bit better spec for marketing -- originally with their RAM DIMMs and boosted voltages. OverClockerZ are not in it for reliability.

    2. Dr Potatohead

      On my equally small sample of OCZ drives, 4 out of 5 have failed. To be fair tho, they were all replaced without any fuss but thats not the issue.

    3. N13L5

      How do we know you're not just making this up and shilling for Intel?

      1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

        @NL13L5 Simple: Intel's storage guys have never done a damned thing for me, ever. In fact, outside of the network team - who got me some sample cards so I could write some reviews and test some things - Intel has generally been an impenetrable fortress of traumatizing marketing fluff that I have more or less avoided*.

        I've been an AMD man for ages. Only recently have I had to start building servers without Opterons inside. When I bought - and wrote about! - SSDs for my own testlab, I bought Kingston Hyper-X based on a combination of price and the Kingston brand name. I think over the years of writing for The Register I've proven that I take the time - and put a fuckload of my own money - into testing products from a variety of manufacturers.

        I'm a nasty, cynical, hard-to-please type that rarely has a nice thing to say about anyone. (Ask Microsoft.) I generally don't like whinging in public - unless I am really tweaked - and so I try hard to write articles about things I actually like. (Why tell the world "this sucks" when you could tell the world "this doesn't suck, use this!")

        If you honestly think that I'm a shill for Intel you're a fool. I have a price - every man does - but that price is far higher than anyone has ever been willing to offer. Right now, I am on track to build a company with me at the head where I write about technology for a living, tell people how to run their companies and get paid for it, manage to pay off my debts in a reasonable period of time and even retire to write my book while I'm still young enough to remember it.

        So tell me, dear N13L5, what possible reason could I have to be a shill for anyone? Do you think an SSD or a server, a phone of a software licence will buy me off? I get paid to troll people on the internets. That's the best job ever; the price to "buy" me out of that comfort zone is pretty damned high. Ambition is expensive and so am I.

        *I once won a PC in a contest sponsored by Intel. However I can guarantee you that this didn't make me any more disposed to like them. The Badaxe motherboard in that PC was made of raw, elemental failure.

  4. Belardi

    OCZ is/was a company that sold above garbage level stuff with western style marketing. They do own some known quality brands... but overall, they just stamp their name onto stuff... or used to.

    I would never touch one of their SSDs. Do they really need 5-6 different kinds of a 120GB SSD?! Of course that is over a price spread between $90~200USD. A company willing to sell crap on the low-end, can't be trusted on the high end. A friend bought an OCZ SSD a year or so ago... then had me look at their computer... wonder why the SSD was so damn slow. Even my OLD X25m is easily faster and more reliable. OCZ, like most other SSD companies don't have any or much maintenance tools for the drives.

    I'd still choose a low-end intel over any OCZ. Doesn't matter how fast it is... when your drive is constantly screwing up.

  5. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge
    Thumb Down

    Doomed

    The Vector is overall not a lot better than the Samsung 840 Pro - better in a couple of areas, worse in others. It's more expensive and backed by a company that might fail.

    There's a load of cheap refurbished OCZ drives out there, but that hardly inspires cinfidence either. Refurbished graphics cards (at worst) cause a BSOD on failure. A failed SSD loses all your data

    Seriously, why would you buy OCZ? If you weren't price sensitive you'd buy the Intel DC S3700.

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