OCZ.com got a facelift, and two new product names emerged as the company transitions deeper into Toshiba. The design changes give us some insight into OCZ future and an exit from the enterprise market. All signs point to closer collaboration and integration.
Toshiba purchased a financially troubled OCZ for $35 Million at the tail end of 2013. After a few years of operating independently, Toshiba has decided to move the company in closer with the global brand. At CES in January, we learned the process was underway but didn't know if the OCZ name would continue. Over the last two weeks, we've seen several changes that include employees receiving new Toshiba email addresses and now a telling public website changeover. It looks like the OCZ name will stay, but the product names move closer to Toshiba's structure.
Love it or hate it, OCZ survived through multiple market downturns and internal turmoil. The company started in Indiana with humble beginnings but soon broke onto the national scene with aggressive performance system memory. Overclocking was taboo and rarely mentioned in the "serious" computing magazines, the dominate media at the time. DRAM proved to be too volatile for many non-fab, single-focus companies. OCZ led the charge to diversify into other markets such as video cards, system cooling components and power supplies--a formula system memory companies like Corsair, Patriot, and others have followed in years since.
The company's greatest success came with the introduction of solid-state drives in 2008. The Core Series was not the first SSD, but history saw this as the first consumer-focused (and consumer-affordable) product. From that point on, OCZ slowly shed other categories from the lineup to focus on flash-based internal and external products.
Now under Toshiba's control, it looks like OCZ will reduce the number of active offerings and become the high-performance face of a company known mainly as an OEM SSD provider. The new website shows only two active products, the TR150 and VT180. These are rebrands of the Trion 150 and Vector 180. All other consumer SSDs have moved to the legacy category, including those introduced after the Toshiba acquisition, such as the Vertex 460A.
Over the last year, OCZ has shown the next iteration of RevoDrive several times. Historically, the RevoDrive series has served as a high-performance workstation product utilizing commodity SATA-based flash controller technology married with onboard RAID controllers. The Revodrive 400 takes a different shape this round. We recently tested the Toshiba XG3, the NVMe-based high-performance OEM SSD that OCZ will rework to become the new RD400. Note the name change to bring this product inline with OCZ's new product name structure.
The new website design also gives us some insight into OCZ's enterprise product line. All of the enterprise SSDs have been moved to the legacy column, and we suspect this will end the category under OCZ branding. Toshiba has a strong presence in the enterprise and offers some of the highest performing NVMe and SAS SSDs on the market today.
Chris Ramseyer is a Contributing Editor for Tom's Hardware, covering Storage. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. Follow Tom's Hardware on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.
