Last week, OCZ, the makers of some very fine SSD drives that are very popular with USENET newsgroup members, had filed for bankruptcy—and Toshiba had offered to acquire “substantially all” of its assets. Now, it looks like the Toshiba deal is all but done.
On technology newsgroups, OCZ says it has reached an agreement with Toshiba whereby the Japanese firm will “acquire substantially all of OCZ’s assets in a chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding for $35M.” The deal has already gotten approval from OCZ’s board of directors, and it’s scheduled to close within 60 days or so. In the meantime, OCZ says it will “continue to operate and serve existing and future customers.”
As part of the deal, Toshiba will acquire OCZ’s “proprietary controllers, firmware and software, as well as the teams responsible for bringing these solutions to market, in addition to OCZ’s established brand and sales channels.” Here’s Toshiba’s statement about the acquisition:
“We are excited to participate in this opportunity. If our bid is successful, the combination of our leading NAND technology with OCZ’s SSD expertise will allow us to further strengthen Toshiba’s SSD business,” said Mr. Seiichi Mori, Vice President of Toshiba’s Semiconductor and Storage Company and Corporate Vice President of Toshiba. “We value OCZ’s SSD business and technology in both the consumer and enterprise markets, and we are confident that it will reinforce our capabilities and help us to secure leadership in the SSD market.”
It’s not clear whether Toshiba intends to keep OCZ’s “established brand” around or not. OCZ has an iffy reliability reputation, and its drives have far more negative reviews than their competitors on major e-tailers like Newegg and Amazon. It would be in Toshiba’s best interest to slap its own name on future drives based on OCZ’s technology.
