OCZ Technology was founded in 2000 past Ryan Petersen equally "The Overclockerz Store," an online hardware reseller that catered to computer enthusiasts. The company started out selling binned processors and memory kits capable of running faster than their rated speeds – items which overclockers were willing to pay a premium for.

Eventually, Petersen parlayed the shop's success into a mainstream PC component business concern, which became OCZ Engineering science. The San Jose-based firm rapidly expanded into multiple categories, including branded video cards, keyboards, mice, and fifty-fifty explored more than exotic offerings similar the Cryo-Z phase alter cooling arrangement.

OCZ Applied science RevoDrive three PCIe SSD

In 2007, OCZ shored up its power supply business by acquiring PC Power & Cooling, one of the nigh well-respected firms in the industry at the time.

A twelvemonth later, OCZ partnered with Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel to design a range of memory and power supplies for gamers. Most, still, will remember the company for its contributions and advancement of early on solid-state drive technology.

Power supplies under the OCZ Applied science banner on brandish at CES 2022

OCZ introduced its kickoff two.five-inch SATA II SSDs in March 2008. That was over a year before Microsoft released Windows 7, the beginning version of the operating system designed to work with solid state drives. The drives, offered in capacities of 32GB and 64GB, featured read and write speeds of upwards to 100MB/s and 80MB/due south, respectively, and utilized no moving parts.

The latter made them a potentially attractive culling for notebook and laptop enthusiasts concerned with mechanical hard drive failure.

A first-gen 30GB OCZ Vertex SSD alongside a 240GB Vertex 3 engineering sample

As is oftentimes the case with a new category of technology, at that place were a lot of wrinkles to iron out before marketing the tech to mainstream consumers.

Early examples didn't deliver the baking speeds that today'due south drives are known for. In fact, functioning could exist quite inconsistent, peculiarly if you didn't apply an alignment tool to specify the optimal drive outset when setting everything up. So there were issues with garbage collection and concerns over flash memory endurance.

SSDs eventually institute their way into the mainstream, you lot could argue in part due to OCZ's contributions to button the engineering forwards.

An Indilinx controller on an OCZ Engineering SSD PCB at CES 2022

The company continued to iterate and experiment with different controllers and firmware, going so far equally to get out the DRAM market place and larn wink retentiveness specialist Indilinx just a few months later.

Pricing remained a concern every bit flash memory was an guild of magnitude more than expensive than traditional spinning media, but the functioning gains that were finally materializing started making the juice worth the squeeze. In one case enthusiasts started making the leap, it wasn't long before the rest of the manufacture followed suit.

OCZ released a plethora of SSDs over the adjacent several years, each a bit more than reliable and faster than before. Nosotros reviewed several of them. College-stop devices like the RevoDrive further pushed the envelope, and the company even branched out into the enterprise infinite. In the stop, however, it would all come crashing down.

Various OCZ Engineering science SSDs on brandish at CES 2022

In September 2022, founder and CEO Ryan Petersen resigned from the company. Bookkeeping and other legal problems would plague the business over the next yr and in late 2022, it was revealed that Toshiba had agreed to buy nearly all of OCZ's avails for $35 one thousand thousand.

Toshiba said it would go on to run the business organization as a subsidiary chosen OCZ Storage Solutions. The Japanese tech giant did release some new OCZ-branded drives but ultimately, OCZ was dissolved and absorbed into Toshiba's retentivity group, after named Kioxia.

OCZ Cryo-Z stage alter libation at CES 2007

OCZ had its fair share of issues over the years and wasn't always the first choice among shoppers. But the outfit did have a manus in helping to make overclocking more mainstream and certainly pushed solid-country drives in the correct direction.

Today, OCZ exists equally "an SSD brand offered by Kioxia for the consumer market," according to its website. The latest press release from the make is dated January eight, 2022, for the RC100 NVMe SSD.