CES 2015 was a pretty big show for the entire storage industry as a whole and OCZ in particular had a strong showing this year with the unveil of their highly anticipated JetExpress controller. Along with JetExpress, OCZ was also proud to say that they’re now putting the final touches on their integration with Toshiba which includes converting their entire SSD lineup to utilize Toshiba’s latest A19nm Toggle Mode MLC NAND.

Although OCZ’s Vector series drives have been using Toshiba first generation 19nm Toggle Mode MLC since the Vector 150 was launched in late 2013, it’s now finally being replaced with the OCZ Vector [...]

Over the past year or so, it’s been no secret that OCZ has had a bit of a rough time in the market, but with the sale of their company to Toshiba late last year, OCZ has quickly been turning themselves around with several new product introductions to complete their transition from the old OCZ Technology Group to the new OCZ Storage Solutions, a Toshiba Group Company.

As a part of their transition, OCZ has been revamping their entire product stack to utilize parent company Toshiba’s NAND. By doing so, this will not only allow OCZ to put top quality NAND in their SSDs, but also provides OCZ with better cost [...]

Among the numerous SSD announcements here at Computex 2014, OCZ Storage Solutions also displayed a brand new SSD, the OCZ Vector 180 Series aimed at the enthusiast/entry level server market. Armed with the Indilinx Barefoot 3 M00 controller and Toshiba A19nm (2nd Gen) MLC Toggle NAND, the Vector 180 is expected to be capable of performance up to 550 MB/s and 100,000 IOPS.

While the OCZ Vector 180 will be sold as a client drive under the Vector line, it’s truly aimed at the low end enterprise markets such as read intensive servers or hyperscale datacenters. Speaking with OCZ Storage Solutions Executive VP & CMO Alex Mei, he told us that one of the [...]

The last few months haven’t been pretty for OCZ. Late in November of last year, OCZ hit rock bottom when they filed for bankruptcy, and within the next two months, Toshiba purchased the then defunct OCZ’s assets for a paltry price of $35 million. Considering only a couple years ago, OCZ was valued at over $1 Billion, Toshiba got a pretty sweet deal for a ton of valuable IP.

Following Toshiba’s acquisition, it seemed like Toshiba would be most interested in merging OCZ with their own SSD division; however, with Toshiba recently completing the OCZ acquisition, it’s been made clear that OCZ will continue to [...]

Over the past couple years, OCZ went from being the top SSD manufacturer in the world to going backrupt, and it seems like the crazy roller coaster ride may have finally come to an end. After reports of a Toshiba buyout after OCZ’s declaration of bankruptcy back in November of last year, OCZ /Toshiba have recently announced that the deal is complete and OCZ will now officially be known as OCZ Storage Solutions – a Toshiba Group Company.

Despite OCZ assets being sold at firesale prices, the OCZ/Toshiba deal is a highly beneficial one for all parties involved. Toshiba now gains OCZ’s consumer and enterprise SSD business along with their valuable [...]

Can’t say we didn’t see this one coming. SSD giant OCZ has just become the latest statistic in the consolidation of the SSD industry. After rising up to be one of the top players in the industry, weathering months of internal turmoil that resulted in the resignation of their CEO, and finally pulling a seemingly impossible turnaround, OCZ announced that as of 11/27/2013, they’ve gone bankrupt.

Despite the bankruptcy, it seems like OCZ may have one last sliver of hope in the form of Toshiba. As rumored not too long ago and now officially confirmed today,  Toshiba is showing strong interest in purchasing OCZ and have officially made an offer for [...]

Generally when most of us think about SSDs, we think about a number of very common names such as OCZ, Kingston, ADATA and Corsair, but when it comes to the bulk of SSDs sold on the market, the major players are actually guys like SanDisk, Samsung, Crucial, and Toshiba, which we’ll refer to as Tier 1 manufacturers. These guys are high volume SSD manufacturers who not only produce actual SSDs themselves, but also own the fab that produces the NAND memory powering the SSD, which in turn gives them access to a stable supply of high quality NAND, control over NAND design, as well as control over NAND pricing. As you may expect, this a [...]

Despite being one of the lucky few who own their own NAND fab and their own controller technology (albeit slow and outdated), when it comes to SSDs SanDisk isn’t usually a name you’d hear too often. While SanDisk has been in the SSD game for a very, very long time, most of their business is conducted with OEMs and SI’s with SanDisk generally supplying their SSDs in off the shelf ultraportable notebooks and Ultrabooks.

Prior to the Extreme II, SanDisk really hasn’t done very much in the consumer space. In early 2012, they released the original Extreme, which was a decent product, but it was built with the [...]

We don’t often participate in the rumormill here as so many don’t seem to pan out, but some rumors do make for more interesting topics of discussion than others, and we recently came across quite an interesting rumor posted over at TweakTown claiming that Toshiba is considering buying OCZ’s consumer SSD division.

For those who follow the SSD industry as closely as we have over the past couple years, you’ll know that OCZ has definitely had a number of ups and downs after they completely dumped their DRAM business in favor of SSDs back in 2011. At the beginning of the SSD boom, OCZ’s SSD business was quite good, but with the ever [...]

OCZ’s Vertex line of SSDs has had a pretty long and pretty interesting history. Starting all the way back in 2008, the earliest Vertex carried the original Indilinx Barefoot controller, which was quite successful due to the great performance of the Barefoot controller at the time. Shortly after, OCZ introduced the Vertex 2 followed by the Vertex 3, which featured multiple iterations of the powerful SandForce controllers that has shaped the standard in SSD performance today.

After OCZ’s acquisition of Indilinx back in 2011, they put their new acquisition to good use, taking the company’s experience and applying it via [...]