Krakoom! OCZ flies into the ground. Time to salvage the engines and look around

Ryan Petersen made OCZ a high-flyer: and then nearly piloted it into the ground. Replacement CEO Ralph Schmitt did crash-land the damaged business, but was unable to repair it and get it flying again. Bankruptcy beckons. OCZ shot itself in the foot (causing its feet to slip from the rudder pedals leading to a crash -Ed) with …

[Slap]

It's not really a surprise

As I sit here I have a pile of dead OCZ drives which were actually replacements for other dead OCZ drives

If this bankruptcy goes my way then I can just throw them in the bin, which is where they should be in the first place, and write off the loss. My time is better spent doing other more productive things than spending it requesting endless RMAs for OCZ drives.

I'm sorry for the people involved and all that, but OCZ has been nothing but a headache for me with 40%, or thereabouts, failure rate. Quite frankly I'm glad to see the back of them.

[Greg Williams]

Re: It's not really a surprise

I think it's definitely a case of YMMV - I have owned 3 OCZ SSDs and also installed them in laptops/PCs belonging to multiple friends and family members - not one single failure yet.

One did have a firmware bug on delivery, but flashed it straight away and it's not missed a beat since.

I have, however, had one dead Samsung and one dead Intel... so... maybe I just got lucky, and you got unlucky :)

[Danny 14]

Re: It's not really a surprise

Out of my 6 original OCZ agility drives I have zero functioning (they have been RMAd since). some were replaced with other agility 2's early on - both of these panic locked within 2 weeks - subsequently all were returned at agility 3s. However, of the 4 replaced to agility 3 all 4 are still running I do not know about the other 2 agility 3s(they havent come back to me at any rate). The RMA path these took were fantastic, each drive circumnavigated the globe (they track each leg of the journey which was nice).

Originally they were in a raid 10 array in an openfiler box. Spinning rust has replaced them as a high cap storage rather than an iSCSI speed experiment. For laptops that need a bit of speed I now use samsung TLC 840s. cheap for the capacity.

I might just have been unlucky but according to the forums I think not. So out of 6 drives ive had a sum total of 8 RMAs (all replacements rather than repairs to the original SSD). Not surprising they went out of business.

[Anonymous Coward]

The main problem OCZ has was that they earned a reputation for being the SSD you you shouldn't buy. The reliability of their SSD's were atrocious and people were vocal about it. It didn't matter whether it was cheaper or performed better than its rivals such as Kingston, in customer reviews, deal websites and message boards there were continual horror stories. I took the plunge and bought one of their SSD's and it as well as the two replacements failed within 15 minutes of being used, two weren't recognised at boot and one decided to quit during a Windows install...and this was the norm among the complaints.

[Tom 38]

I bought a couple of refurb OCZ SSDs to use as cache devices - no-one else will touch them, so they are dead cheap, and it doesn't affect my server if they do crash.

Both are currently working OK, but I don't trust them at all!

[Zmodem]

most people buy OCZ because the name sounds good and makes the custom PC have some respekt

WD retail hdd break every month or 2, so everyone buys seagates

[Destroy All Monsters]

> WD retail hdd break every month or 2, so everyone buys seagates

Lolwhat m8?

[Zmodem]

retail HDD`s have the back plate on, and hides the PCB, all retail drives are rubbish because they overheat, its probably rare for any make drive to last a whole year, western digital drives suck

OEM drives without the back plates will go for 10 years for more

seagate barracuda`s have a backup bootsector but no tool to know if the main sector has failed

[Anonymous Coward]

> retail HDD`s have the back plate on, and hides the PCB, all retail drives are rubbish because they overheat, its probably rare for any make drive to last a whole year, western digital drives suck

You high son?

I don't think I have even seen a hard disk with a "backplate" hiding the pcb, retail or otherwise.

I have three WD drives, none are less than two years old.

[Alan Brown]

"I don't think I have even seen a hard disk with a "backplate" hiding the pcb, retail or otherwise."

I have, but not since the 1990s.

[Zmodem]

try looking at the label

[jason 7]

Don't worry he's another one of the regular Walter Mitty types around here.

This is the one that said all soldiers should be issued with 50 calibre Desert Eagles as the side-arm of choice.

Gangsta stylee!

[Benjamin 4]

"everyone buys seagates"

I'd rather backup to floppy discs. Not really, but I lost a number of earlyish (2-12gb ide) Seagate drives to stiction and have never trusted the brand since. Never had a WD drive fail on me (without being dropped in a laptop) yet.

Transcend for SSD / flash storage all the way.

[Zmodem]

i said a desert eagle is more convient then a shotgun, a shotgun is your only main weapon, if your not a 16 year old, a desert eagle is alot better then your shotgun, and your platoons should have the choice which they take

every shop is full of seagate barracuda`s, everyone buys them, even PC world will stock OEM`s in todays world

[Anony-mouse]

@ Zmodem

And you don't know WTF you are talking about either, dood. Unlike you, I do happen to own a Mark VII Desert Eagle in 44 Mag and while it's a great conversation piece and is fun to shoot, it isn't nearly as versatile as a shotgun. And even in 44 mag, the recoil isn't something that just anyone can handle, much less shoot accurately. The pistol is heavy and takes a person with rather large hands to be able to hold it comfortably. And .50 AE kicks even worse than my 44 Mag version and after 50-100 rounds at the range my wrist is tired enough to not be able to shoot as accurately. It's a fun pistol to shoot and would make a decent hunting pistol, but it's not something you would want to carry around all day either (like I said earlier it is heavy). The pistol weighs almost as much as an M4 rifle.

As far as the article is concerned, I've been waiting for this to come down for well over a year. Too many problems with their SSD lines and they got away from their core business that made their name, fast memory sticks.

[Zmodem]

Re: @ Zmodem

if you have a shotgun then you have a whole backpack full of different shells and its your only main weapon

most army man do weights all day and a extra lb wont pull a muscle, you only need 8 magazines top and have a machine gun for main combat which is all good for urban warfare and the toon wont be 1 man short when theres 100 yards to go

[Sorry that handle is already taken.]

What is this I don't even

[Zmodem]

you got point, tip toeing around buildings, desert eagle is a 1 shot kill, just like a shotgun, with modern metals and some rework and custom parts from a military CNC machine and engineers that sit about doing nothing, they can easily make the barrel shorter and gun lighter in general,. just like the british army will rebuild whole jets and helicopters on the day they get delivered and fit them with rolls royce engines etc

most machine guns are too long and big, and if your out on your 4 day roll, there is no point in wasting ammo if you can get pinned down in a 12 hour battle

[Graham Dawson]

"machine guns"

You mean rifles, surely? An automatic rifle and a "machine gun" are very different classes of weapon. The infantry carry rifles (M16A1 for the US, LA85 SA80 for the UK). There might be the odd shotgun floating around, and the odd 50cal if they want to make a real mess, but the majority will be carrying rifles and enough ammo to deal with most situations.

What they won't be carrying is a bloody heavy lump of metal designed to make people feel manly.

And all this talk about the military rebuilding their weapons with CNC machines? Please. They would order a half-million custom units, not buy stock and rebuild it. Nor would they order a pistol that didn't use 9mm NATO.

And the British Army don't fly jets. That's the RAF's job, and they have the sense to order them with the right engines to begin with.

I'm starting to think you don't actually know what you're talking about.

[Zmodem]

machine guns like ray guns, machine guns, the RAF arn`t special with engineering courses, the army has all the same training, but in different areas of mechanics

the army takes cares of all of its weapons, and when the british army makes a weapon, its always 1 of the best in the world, all other countries try to beat

[Graham Dawson]

You're so adorable.

[Zmodem]

doing basic CNC work is probably part of your NVQ level 1 qualification, just like making a table in wood work

[Sorry that handle is already taken.]

I've got a small stack of failed WD drives here.

Of course this proves nothing as I was only using WD at the time; context is everything. I suspect I gave these ones heatstroke. No failed Seagates, or any other manufacturer, so far.

[Zmodem]

on OEM drive on the bottom side, there will be a inch or 2 of the PCB showing like this, on retail drive it will be all covered in a back plate and they all fail because they over heat

[Anonymous Coward]

Must be the only one in the room to have good stories about OCZ. I have three RevoDrives, my last the 240GB works a treat as the OS drive.

The one huge issue I had was no Linux support, but I forgave them for that eventually. Too bad they had to go under. At least they tried new things that the big boys wouldn't.

[Sorry that handle is already taken.]

Three Agility 3s running just fine here.

[Marcelo Rodrigues]

At least two

Agility 3 - 60 GiB.

Working like a charm. I must be the lucky one... Or the earlier series were bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

Anecdotes and data, but....

My machine has OCZ RAM in it and has never grumbled once in 4 1/2 years, and my OCZ SSD is rock solid. I must have been one of the lucky ones...

[Graham 24]

(So far, unjustified) paranoia

I have 4 OCZ Vertex 4, 2 in RAID 1 as a boot drive and 2 in RAID1 as a data drive. RAID 1 because I'd heard the horror stores, but OCZ Vertex 4 anyway because I picked the drives up at a price too good to miss. So far, not a hint of an issue with any of them.

[EvanPyle]

2x Revodrive X3-2.1.4 or what ever they are called and 3x agility 3 drives and never a single issue.

Good thing I just got my new 480gb revodrive!

[Tom 38]

It will be a bad thing if your 480gb revodrive goes titsup the day after they go titsup (or the month before tbh).