OCZ discuss the past, the present and the future under Toshiba

Regular readers will know that KitGuru is running a project to flog five OCZ AR100 SSDs until they keel over and die. It's a rare thing to have a major brand such as OCZ practically begging us to destroy their products so naturally we wanted to find out more about their motives.

The OCZ man in the firing line today is James Tout, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Engineering.

Read about the OCZ KitGuru Challenge!
Read original ‘challenge’ editorial on 10th December, HERE.
Read 17th December 2014 ‘challenge’ update, HERE.
Read 27th December 2014 22TB mark update, HERE.
Read 10th January 2015 100TB mark update, HERE.

James runs the UK operation for OCZ and it came as a complete surprise to find this doesn't mean a handful of caffeinated salespeople who drive late-model Audis. Instead there is a total of 60 engineering types who write firmware, develop silicon, perform endurance testing and endlessly look for problems before they hit the customer.

The message that comes across loud and clear from this interview is that OCZ had major problems some three years ago when it used third-party hardware (flash memory and controllers plus modified firmware) and, crucially, failed to perform adequate development and testing when it knitted those parts together.

This led to the catastrophe of the SandForce SF-2281 failures and, ultimately, the failure of the company.

Since the acquisition by Toshiba, OCZ is a transformed company. These days OCZ exclusively uses Toshiba flash, its consumer SSDs are powered by their own Barefoot controllers (it's a slightly different story with certain Enterprise SSD) and the firmware is written in-house.

If you have a problem with your OCZ SSD and call their ShieldPlus warranty phone line you'll speak to someone from OCZ, rather than a call centre drone.

These are bold claims and signs of a radical overhaul at OCZ however you'll need to watch the interview and see what you think to draw your own conclusions.

That's the point.

It doesn't much matter what KitGuru may think.

The only people that OCZ needs to influence are you, the paying customers.

Discuss on our Facebook page, over HERE.

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