OCZ Technology

» see ocz.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

OCZ turned up in my part lists in the middle of the 2000s, in the window when a Turkish PC build was a forum argument long before it was a purchase. I was reading donanimhaber and frmtr in those years and signatures carried a hardware list the way everybody's did. OCZ was one of the brands that went into a signature rather than one you quietly owned. Buying its memory was a statement that you cared about timings, and the statement was most of the product.

The company was set up in August 2002 by Ryan Petersen and Bhulinder Sethi, out of an online shop Petersen had been running since 2000 called The Overclockerz Store. The business was buying ordinary DRAM and binning it for the parts that clocked past spec. Those went out under a heatspreader with a lifetime warranty and a price to match. It widened from there into power supplies, mostly by buying PC Power & Cooling in May 2007, and into a few genuinely strange products including a headband that read the muscle and eye signals off your forehead and claimed you could steer a game with them.

Solid state was the real business and OCZ got there early. From 2009 its drives ran Indilinx Barefoot controllers and were, for a stretch, the fastest consumer SSDs you could buy, which is why the company bought Indilinx outright in March 2011 for about 32 million dollars in stock. The problem underneath was that OCZ had no flash of its own. It bought NAND on the open market and sold into the most price-sensitive corner of the business, which left nothing in the margin to absorb anything going wrong.

~ the record ~

~ the restated quarters ~

Two things went wrong at once. The SandForce-based Vertex drives that made the company's name in 2011 and 2012 also produced a failure rate high enough to become its own genre of forum thread, and OCZ was doing RMAs at a volume no thin-margin hardware company survives. Meanwhile the revenue had been reported wrong. The board fired Petersen on 17 September 2012, and the finance team then restated results going back across fiscal 2012 and into fiscal 2013, at which point NASDAQ set a deadline of 16 September 2013 for the overdue filings. The SEC eventually charged Petersen and the former CFO Arthur Knapp over how the numbers had been produced.

On 27 November 2013 OCZ told the market it had signed an asset purchase agreement with Toshiba and expected to file for bankruptcy protection. The petition went into the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware on 2 December 2013, jointly administered as case 13-13126 with Indilinx and Sanrad as co-debtors. Toshiba's offer was 35 million dollars, about 20 million of which had already been advanced as cash to keep the company breathing through the process.

~ what toshiba kept ~

Toshiba closed on 21 January 2014 and ran the acquired business as OCZ Storage Solutions, a wholly owned subsidiary that kept shipping consumer drives under the old name. The part it wanted was distribution and a brand with enthusiast credibility, since Toshiba made flash and had never been any good at selling it retail. OCZ Storage Solutions was dissolved on 1 April 2016 and folded into the parent, and the branded drives were eventually rebadged as Toshiba and then handed on again when the whole memory business became Kioxia in 2019.

The shell left behind in Delaware was renamed ZCO Liquidating Corporation. Its plan of liquidation was confirmed on 30 July 2014 and took effect on 18 August 2014, and that August date is the one carried in a lot of databases as the death of OCZ. It is not. It is the date a corporate husk finished paying out, eight months after the company itself stopped existing. The address outlasted all of it: ocz.com still answers, with a 301 to a Kioxia support page filed under legacy products.

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