Where Once We Sailed The OCZs

The Original OCZ Would Have Been 20 Years Old

OCZ had a very interesting run during the 13 years it was in operation, starting from a small store front and growing into a respected provider  of a variety of products, especially their SSDs.  In 2000 Ryan Petersen opened The Overclockerz Store in Portage, Indiana, selling hand selected processors and memory with specific bins and steppings which were known to be the most overclocking friendly; at a premium of course.  TechSpot takes a walk down memory lane in a recent article describing the inception, growth and eventual extinction of OCZ.  I had thought the Sunnyvale location behind the first Fry’s but thanks to an old OCZ alumni and reader the correct location in Indiana has been added.

We at PCPer (and AMDMB for that matter) had many experiences with OCZ and their products, and it is worth taking a look back at a few of the highs and lows of the company.  It is hard to say what our first review with them might have been, considering there are 42 pages of results when you search the site which gives you an idea of the volume at least.

A few of the early highlights included a mouse with a button that would register three clicks from a single button press, which is why they had the nickname of the Triple Threat.   Around that same time Lee had a chance to review the 1000W ProXStream PSU, from back in the days when running multiple GPUs was a little more common than it is today; not that it was ever extremely common after the demise of Voodoo and 3DFX.  This was also around the time they introduced watercooled RAM with their OCZ PC2-9200 Flex XLC Memory which was capable of an almost unheard of 1280 MHZ when overclocked which was released back in January of 2018.

2011 is when things got more interesting, when OCZ abandoned the memory business altogether to focus on PSUs and SSDs.  This is also the time when OCZ became a (techie) household name with their purchase of Indilinx who created the Barefoot SSD controller.  They continued to provided Sandforce and Vertex controllers in their SSDs, which was part of the reason the SSD Decoder Ring was created.  The move to Indilinx and Barefoot was almost prescient, as LSI scooped up SandForce later on that year. saw was the RC100 NVMe SSD which was released back in January of 2018.

Unfortunately this change in their SSD business also spelled their eventual downfall.  In order to try to corner the market on enthusiast SSDs Ryan Petersen introduced steep discounts and rebates on OCZ SSDs, which might have increased their overall sales but had a very negative effect on their profits.  In February 2013 OCZ received warning that they would be delisted from the stock exchange as they had not provided  proper profit statement since Q1 2012.

They did work with Crowe Horwath LLP to try to meet that deadline, and while a report was released it was damming for the company.  The more product they sold, the more money they lost thanks to those deep discounts.  At that point OCZ was scooped up by Toshiba who intended to make use of the intellectual property to enhance their own product line.   Toshiba did not release many SSDs after that purchase and eventually the only remaining products came from Toshiba’s memory group, called Kioxia.

As TechSpot points out in their conclusion, the last product we saw was the RC100 NVMe SSD which was released back in January of 2018.