OCZ SSD sales increase 265%

[Grall]

I noticed on Swedish website Nordic Hardware that OCZ released their quarterly report the other day, with some interesting statistics showing SSD units may be making it big quite soon it seems. OCZ seems to be determined to be one of the big players in this market; their SSD profits rose 51% to just over $20M, even though the company as a whole made a loss of over $7M.

It would seem they blame their DRAM division for this, maybe not so strange as DRAM has historically been very low-margins and highly volatile in price. Ironically, I myself own no OCZ products except for 6 sticks of their Platinum 1600MHz DDR3, which I run slightly overclocked at 1660MHz, with 7-7-7-20 timings. These are wonderful DIMMs I really must say. Great quality, the PCB is nice and clean with good solder work, the heat spreaders are solidly built, and they perform really well.

Only negative aspect is due to heatspreaders being standard height, when you stack 6 of em together and run at 1.65V@1600+ MHz they get fucking hot! So hot in fact the system will crash if there's no air circulation around the modules. Fortunately I have a Noctua 140mm CPU cooler fan these days on a Noctua "C"-type heatsink so the fan is aimed down at the mobo, and the cooler overhangs the DIMMs enough that they get that bit of air circulation they need. My PC is hence absolutely rock stable. With just 3 dimms installed I didn't need the 140mm fan, a standard 120mm was sufficient.

So I really wish OCZ the best, they seem like a great, forward-thinking company. From what I can tell they also seem to treat customers right, by and large anyway. So I hope they can make enough money to become profitable, and put out some awesome SSD products to really shake up the stagnant storage industry. HDDs have more or less just grown larger for a decade now, with performance barely going up from one generation to the next. Manufacturers have had precious little incentive to boost IOPS performance on desktop units, due to any increases eating away at their high-margins enterprise offerings.

A kick in the pants is what they need. If SSDs weren't so incredibly bad from a MB/$ P.O.V, several HDD manufacturers would just keel over and die. They may still keel over and die since none of the traditional HDD makers have shown any real willingness or capability to embrace this new market...

 

[Mintmaster]

A computer shop I went to recently had pretty bad things to say about OCZ RAM, saying the return rate was really high. I guess that jives with these results.

OCZ SSDs are awesome, though. They chose their controllers well, avoiding the stuttering problem of the J-Micron controller and then moving to the Sandforce controller. They only a little more per GB than the cheapest SSDs while offering better performance than Intel.

 

[cychris]

They did have Jmicron products out (Solid, Core and Apex series if memory serves me right). It was only after Anandtech uncovered the issue that they took swift action. Still commendable but as with everyone else at the time they used Jmicron controllers.

Personal experience with OCZ RAM has been great though. Recommend it to anyone any-time.

 

[Grall]

Still commendable but as with everyone else at the time they used Jmicron controllers.

There wasn't really much else to choose from at the time. Samsung had a controller too that was fucken slow as well, and a lot more expensive, and what else was there? Nothing that was much good in any respect...

 

[Albuquerque]

I have an OCZ Vertex 2 Extended 120gb drive that I paid ~$240. I like it so far, no complaints. They've had some excellent deals on them in the recent past...

 

[xatnys]

They're known for having some of the fastest SSDs in the market at the moment, largely in part because they are using a sandforce based controller. The boost in sales explains why there have been deals for their SSDs as much as 40% off.

It may also be that they're preparing for the next generation of SSDs, as sandforce announced a new controller just last week that is supposed to be 2 to 3x faster than current SSDs.

Not sure whether to wait for those or get one of the current models but it's driving me nuts!

 

[Grall]

SSD prices aren't likely to come down much until next-gen (25nm, or what is it?) flash memory starts becoming commonplace. Intel/Micron production isn't up to speed yet, and it seems samsung and the others aren't ready either.

Perhaps the generation after this coming one is when the real breakthrough will start. If ~250GB capacity could be had for a decent price, then most users could start relying on SSDs for their everyday use. Not everone has a million MP3s and their entire movie library ripped, and besides, one could always have a HDD for cheap bulk storage for non-performance critical stuff like that.

 

[BRiT]

I'm amazed they've been able to stay afloat considering they used to only sell RAM for a number of years. OCZ RAM is absolute garbage. It's been that way since the day they first had a RAM product, I think it's been 5 years of absolute garbage. Scour the enthusiast forums and websites for horror stories.

OCZ's SSD starting from their Vertex 1 and Agility 1 product line has been amazing products. Their SSDs are the only item I'd ever consider purchasing. I'd avoid their RAM at all costs and will not gamble on their PSUs.

 

[Mintmaster]

They did have Jmicron products out

Yeah, but they dumped them ASAP while other manufacturers continued to use them. The Vertex and Agility were the models that made their SSD products fly off the shelves, and the second gen were the first ones using Sandforce, AFAIK. OCZ deserves props for that and making their products have the best bang for the buck.

 

[eastmen]

my vertex is going strong and was purchased in june of 09.

 

[Grall]

Scour the enthusiast forums and websites for horror stories.

Forum hearsay = less than worthless.

 

[corduroygt]

SSD is the only real way to improve performance as even $500 laptops have a dual core processor and 4GB of memory. Going from a C2D to core i processor isn't noticable during general use, so it's better to spend the money on the slowest component of the system.

I have a ULV C2D laptop and it's faster than most people's laptops due to my X25. I also get 10 hours of battery life in a 3.7lb package.

 

[eastmen]

I'm guessing sales are going up because of price. I saw kingstons v+ line is down to $110 at microcenter after rebate. Those are pretty good drives. Even the ocz vertex is under $150. Thats not bad for 60/64 gig ssds. Its more than enough for windows and a bunch of apps. Apprently the new sandforce controller next year is able to do away with extra dram chips that most controllers use and is still able to hit 500mb/s so with that and 28nm drives coming on the market prices will drop again.

I have one in my desktop the vertex and have a kingston v (not the plus) in my laptop and its amazing. Wil lbuy another desktop one when a 120gigs hits around $150

 

[Grall]

A DRAM device isn't particulary expensive though, particulary the low-end commodity devices used in current SSDs. Remember that conventional harddrives use pretty hefty DRAM caches these days, and a HDD is dirt cheap. It's the flash and the controller that's expensive in a SSD (supercapacitor too perhaps, if one is used.) The DRAM on the other hand is peanuts in comparison.

 

[eastmen]

A DRAM device isn't particulary expensive though, particulary the low-end commodity devices used in current SSDs. Remember that conventional harddrives use pretty hefty DRAM caches these days, and a HDD is dirt cheap. It's the flash and the controller that's expensive in a SSD (supercapacitor too perhaps, if one is used.) The DRAM on the other hand is peanuts in comparison.

while true , 64 to a 128 megs of it will still shave money off the cost of the drive and 28nm nand will lower the cost from what I believe right now is 40nm nand.

I personaly think that 64gig drives will fall down and replace the current 30 and 40 gig drives at the sub $100 price point and that 128 gig drives will fall under $200 . We are already getting there. You can get some of the 30/40 gig drives for $50-70 bucks and there are some 60 gigs hitting sub $100 prices (althoug hthey are the ones like the oynx drives that are much slower) however the v+ series is actually pretty fast 220mb/170 i believe.

I'm waiting for a bit longer , i'm hoping once next gen stuff hits early next year i will be able to get a current 128gig model close to $100. I'm still on sata 3.0 right now anyway and will be till at least bulldozer.

I figure the 128 becomes my main drive and i move more software over to it that i haven't yet and the 60 gig vertex will go to the games i play most often

 

[Grall]

I'm still on sata 3.0 right now anyway and will be till at least bulldozer.

That's not going to bottleneck you though, as how often do you really copy multi-gigabyte files around? If the copy takes 10 seconds instead of 5, do you really consider that lost time?

It's I/O ops performance that matters, not straight read/write speed, and it will take many many years before sata2 270-280MB/s real-world becomes any kind of limitation under such conditions.

Heck, CPUs might become a bottleneck if 512b-4k I/Os ever start reaching near 300MB/s.

 

[eastmen]

That's not going to bottleneck you though, as how often do you really copy multi-gigabyte files around? If the copy takes 10 seconds instead of 5, do you really consider that lost time?

It's I/O ops performance that matters, not straight read/write speed, and it will take many many years before sata2 270-280MB/s real-world becomes any kind of limitation under such conditions.

Heck, CPUs might become a bottleneck if 512b-4k I/Os ever start reaching near 300MB/s.

Lots of porn to get sorted my friend !

Na just kidding but i actually do take alot of home videos of my little nephew and my niece is coming on the 8th. So I take alot of video and work and transfer files alot.

But really i do that on my old school 2TB drives.

 

[Rootax]

There wasn't really much else to choose from at the time. Samsung had a controller too that was fucken slow as well, and a lot more expensive, and what else was there? Nothing that was much good in any respect...

Did Mtron sold their controller at the time ?

My Mtron 3500 (64gb SLC) is still going strong for my OS drive. Mtron is dead now tough, too bad...

 

[aaronspink]

Apprently the new sandforce controller next year is able to do away with extra dram chips that most controllers use and is still able to hit 500mb/s so with that and 28nm drives coming on the market prices will drop again.

Yeah, if you believe Sandforce's specs which haven't proven true to far! The Sandforce controller is great at write a lot of 'b0 or 'b1 but not nearly as good at writing real data. And then there is their slow down factor over time which is quite large. SF has gotten a lot of good press by gaming a couple benchmarks but the reality is they aren't that fast and are really one of the slower options on the market atm. If their current spec inflation holds true for their next gen, they will be lucky to hit 150 MB/s and that's with their top end spec!

 

[Grall]

Tbh, linear transfer rate is quite insignificant overall, and "only" 150MB/s is very very competitive with mechanical harddrives in that regard... It's the by and large (almost) nonexistent access time that is the big advantage for SSDs, not fast transfer rates.