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OCZ is bankrupt, to be acquired by Toshiba
It's interesting that the upstart SSD controller manufacturers who managed to make a good controller quickly got bought out by larger companies. LSI bought SandForce, Hynix bought LAMD, and now Toshiba is buying OCZ, which itself bought Indilinx.
Hopefully this will lead to a Toshiba-branded SSD based on the Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller, but with better validation than OCZ could or would do.
Comments
For us not quite up on current hardware, SSD controller is an IC integrated into an SSD drive?
You make me like charity
Yup, pretty much. It's the brains in an SSD that glues all the NAND memory together, and it implements neat things like encryption, TRIM, over-provisioning, random write allocation, error correction, and so forth.
It's basically the only difference between a "good" SSD and a crappy SSD.
Indicates to me they overextended to get Indilinx - they may have thought more companies would want to license the controllers than actually did.
That, and in the last year or two a lot more companies have jumped into the SSD market, and in a big way. Many of them with some weight to throw around: Kingston, Mushkin, SanDisk, etc. The more players in the race, the tighter the margins become. When your only real competition is Intel, you got plenty of room to undercut them and still make a nice margin.
Your right, early on it was basically just OCZ and Intel. Crucial picked up relatively early, and Samsung has been strong for a long time. Toshiba has been a player, but mainly only in OEM sales (they have been the stock Apple provider of SSDs for a long time now).
I am glad to see them get picked up rather than just wither away - because they did release some innovative products, and they were a major force in bringing SSDs to the fore front. Toshiba also makes HDDs (they have a deal with WD's 3.5" HD business), so this could also shake up the Hybrid lineup too.
Roses are red
Violets are blue
The reviewer has a mishapen head
Which means his opinion is skewed
...Aldous.MF'n.Huxley
Samsung sold SSDs before OCZ did. The shift with Samsung was when their second SSD controller was finally good enough to be worthwhile, and at that point, Samsung decided to exclusively make their own SSDs rather than licensing their controller to others--including OCZ.
Intel wasn't the first to sell SSDs; they were only the first to sell good SSDs. The importance of Indilinx was as an alternative SSD controller that was worthwhile. But that's an Indilinx thing more so than OCZ; Super-Talent, Patriot, G.Skill, and Mushkin started selling Indilinx SSDs just after OCZ did.
While OCZ did a variety of things like PCI Express SSDs and internal RAID configurations and so forth, that was actually part of the problem. The more products you have, the harder it is to make sure that they all work reliably with all of the SATA controllers and other hardware configurations out there. Inadequate validation was ultimately OCZ's downfall.
Toshiba barely paid more to acquire OCZ than OCZ did to acquire Indilinx. Both of those were a small fraction of what LSI paid to acquire SandForce.
Which tells me they bet the farm on Indilinx (either overleveraged themselves, paid too much for Indilinx, or both). And lost the bet.
Toshiba didn't have to pay full market value, just whatever the bankruptcy courts declared was fair for OCZ's creditors/debt obligations. And if that "fair" number happens to be just a hair over what they paid outright for Indilinx, it doesn't necessarily mean anything, but it does strongly suggest some things.
No more OCZ PCI SSD?
If it became cheaper I'll buy one