OCZ Technology: Gone But Not Forgotten

[Aus spot]

Only memory of the company was the ssd. Never used or heard of them after that died.

Still refund was easy, mine lasted longer than many, the store just asked what drive it was and did an instant refund as it was very well known fault.

 

[ilovetohateyou]

Blast from the past!

I had OCZ Gold DDR2 (8GB) RAM kit and one of their 550W PSU's in my 2009 era dual core Black Edition Phenom II X2 550 build.

Both were trouble free for the 3-4yrs I ran it, which was longer than I anticipated keeping it because I was able to unlock 2 extra cores on the 550, making it a full on Quad Core!

I went with the same kit except 4GB total, and the X2 555. Mine unlocked to quad core for a bit but after a while wasn't so stable. Didn't care or really remember that until GTA V released and I couldn't use the extra two cores at all and I was so bummed.

 

[mailpup]

I bought a custom PC Power & Cooling PSU for my first Dell desktop, which had stupid proprietary power connectors to the motherboard.

I did the same for the same reason for an old Dell that I had.

Also, ages ago I bought a single OCZ flash drive. No complaints about it and I still use it occasionally.

 

[theGurry]

I'm still using my 750w OCZ PSU. Bought it in 2011 and have had zero issues to this day.

 

[Gezzer]

Yep, the Sandforce debacle killed their reputation for me. It was a horror show at the time.

Yeah me too. My very first SSD was a OCZ... lucky me. Nothing but problems, so it was the last OCZ product I ever bought.

 

[grvalderrama]

I used to have 2x2 GB 800Mhz Ocz Gold edition RAM with my Core 2 Duo, before I went back to AMD. They're still working smoothly, I gave that pc to my cousin. Still rocking after many years.

 

[EClyde]

Bummer Man

 

[AMD718]

Still rocking an OCZ 1000w PSU in my gaming PC. Picked it up in 2011 I believe. Did replace the cheap fan in it with a silent wings a few years ago. Excellent PSU. Have many old OCZ RAM modules in the closet. Also an OCZ gladiator copper heatsink and fan. Oh, memories ...

 

[MaxSmarties]

I bought several RAM kits and Vertex SSDs from their website in the past... it was very reliable and they had a good configurator on the website.

 

[Yad]

The only time I bought an OCZ was when I bought their SSD Vertex line.
The drive died after a month or so.
After checking online it was a firmware issue and a lot of users were affected and all were replacing it,some having the same issue again.

 

[failquail]

The only time I bought an OCZ was when I bought their SSD Vertex line.
The drive died after a month or so.
After checking online it was a firmware issue and a lot of users were affected and all were replacing it,some having the same issue again.

I had the firmware issues too.

It'd just randomly brick itself for no reason.

Did manage to recover it by jumpering it into engineering mode and reflashing the firmware a few times, but a few years back it died for good. Have the PCB pinned to my wall

 

[Grumpy Wolf]

Pretty sure most people remember ocz for their ram, not ssd's.

 

[Lounds]

OCZ's branding looked good but their products weren't the most reliable. I had quite a few DDR2 sticks go faulty.

Oddly I had a 120GB agility 3 SSD and guess what it never failed on me, my biggest problem was how slow it got later in its life, it could only perform about 120-180MB/s read and it's write speeds dropped to below 70MB/s.

 

[tkabou]

Both my oldest USB flash drives with 8 and 16GB capacities were from OCZ - the Diesel and Rally2. Still use them today, have stuff stored on it from +10 years ago, cool/unique orange LED (Rally2) light that in today's world would be frowned upon. The Rally2 is still very fast today for a USB2.0 drive (was one of the fastest at launch time).

 

[wizardB]

Worst power supplies made at the time, would regularly go up in flames.

 

[FatherOfJustice]

Worst power supplies made at the time, would regularly go up in flames.

It really depends. OCZ sourced our PSU's from several different manufacturers. The SeaSonic ones were good. The GameXStream lineup had a lot of issues.

Oh OCZ. I remember a mouse I purchased of theirs that died 5 times and was RMA'd 5 times. I eventually gave up and bought logitech. Never before have I see such failure.

We only made one mouse, the Equalizer and Equalizer Mini. They were made by A4Tech (Who still makes products under the Bloody line)

I'd guess your scroll wheel had issues, or there were tracking issues, based on my memories of doing support on that mouse.

 

[FatherOfJustice]

I worked at OCZ in Marketing and Support for a decade. (2003-2013)

I have plenty of memories. I will just say that our CEO, Ryan Petersen, was a really awful person and I have PTSD from how he used to yell at me and treat me. He would send products he knew were bad into the channel just to get the money and worry about the issues later. He knew the Vertex 3 had firmware issues and wanted to launch early, hence all of the S3 Sleep issues the drive had.

He would regularly ship knowing failed RAM. He stuck a retailer in Europe with a bunch of merchandise they simply couldn't sell.

It was wild, but I know my department always tried our best with what we had.

 

[FatherOfJustice]

The Sandforce controller ended up hurting OCZ more than any other company that used it. Sandforce was fast, but downside is your drive could just stop working. Nearly everyone using that Sandforce controller had problems, but OCZ by far took the biggest hit to their rep.

Otherwise OCZ used to be a pretty decent company. I for sure was rocking OCZ Memory during the DDR2 days. They had some of the best.

SandForce had no cache and they were rife with issues. Ryan also didn't care that the Vertex 3 had a known S3 sleep issue and shipped anyways, with Intel finding a fix for the issue, since they too were making drives using SandForce controllers at the time.

Our RAM was pretty good. The guy who did the procurement is the guy who is currently the VP of DRAM procurement at Corsair, Mickey Sethi. Ryan pissed him off something extra and he left for Corsair, where he has flourished. OCZ stopped doing RAM within a year of Mickey leaving.

 

[Laszlo P]

As I scan through some of the posts above, they remind me how many drives I did have and still have from OCZ. I purchased them in pairs 2.5 inch drives, like VERTEX 2, VERTEX 3 VERTEX4 w. Indilinx controllers. Had some of the Limited edition drives ouch-$$$, and IBIS 250GB 3.5 inch HDL. Then some of the aluminum housing drives, green agility, and some of the TR series.
Had a fair amount of memories, but not nearly as much as SSD drives.
finished it off with an NVMe drive [toshiba and OCZ]
I just realized, I had to be a DieHard fan, reminiscing back now. Had very little trouble with them.
The first generation I used on WindowsXP, they still had to be optimized with some utility.
I look in on the website from time to time still.
Thanks for all that.

 

[urbanman2004]

Still disappointed that my old OCZ SSD bricked on me back in 2018. One of the most devastating days of my life ?

 

[evolucion8]

I had the OCZ GameXstream 700W and was very good, sold it and also had the Vertex 4 128GB which was a stellar performer, also sold it and I still have an OCZ ARC100 in my Guzila MiniPC and still working amazingly well, 19nm Toshiba MLC NAND and 240 enough for basic compute and HTPC and surprisingly fast! Even for a lowly Celeron J4125 that matches the i3 of the Clarkdale era.

 

[mrtraver]

I had OCZ DDR and modular PSU in my first build, and my first SSD was an Agility. I still have an Alchemy keyboard that I use on my build/troubleshooting bench.

 

[eXnil88]

My first SSD was an OCZ Vertex 3 128GB back in 2008/9 as my OS drive, then as a game drive 4 years later and I still use it today, I moved it into my laptop about 4 years back, but it's still going as a near daily driver with no issues. It is in fact the SSD I have always quoted to "SSD short life span naysayers" who sadly still seem to exist today lol - 12 years strong - a testament to OCZ's quality SSD's. I remember back in those days drooling over OCZ's RevoDrive lineup as part of my dream build... when a 1TB SSD was still unheard of. and read speeds of 1GB/s was only achievable with RAID.