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A few days back OCZ, a solid-state storage manufacturer announced that they were filing for bankruptcy. Toshiba has come forth to buy the assets of OCZ for $35 million.
OCZ has confirmed this news. According to the release, Toshiba will be acquiring “OCZ’s client and enterprise solid state drive business” and that the sale is expected to close “within approximately 60 days.” Toshiba will also be providing OCZ with the funding it needs to buy up NAND and support “existing and future customers” during the transitional period.
The purchase nets Toshiba every single part of OCZ, most crucially its “proprietary controllers, firmware, and software, as well as the teams responsible for bringing those solutions to market.” In other words, Toshiba will now own all of OCZ’s tech and the people responsible for developing it, as well as OCZ’s “established brand and sales channels.”
OCZ CEO Ralph Schmidt blamed “credit issues” and NAND supply issues for the company’s financial woes, as well as an increasingly competitive SSD market (other players include Samsung, Crucial, SanDisk, and Intel, and those are just a few of the biggest names). As technologies mature, it’s common for smaller companies to merge with and acquire one another until just a few players are left standing—the same thing happened in the GPU industry in the late 90s and early 2000s, for example.
Toshiba already sells a number of SSD models to consumers and to OEMs. While the release states that OCZ’s branding is part of the sale, it remains to be seen whether Toshiba will continue to develop and sell new OCZ-branded products in the future or if its technology will be sold under Toshiba’s name. We’ve contacted an OCZ representative for comment and will update if we receive a response.
