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29-590: To meaningfully describe the performance characteristics of any storage device, it is necessary to specify a minimum of three metrics simultaneously: IOPS, response time, and (application) workload. Absent simultaneous specifications of response-time and workload, IOPS are essentially meaningless. In isolation, IOPS can be considered analogous to "revolutions per minute" of an automobile engine i.e. an engine capable of spinning at 10,000 RPMs with its transmission in neutral does not convey anything of value, however an engine capable of developing specified torque and horsepower at

58-459: A $ 30 million loan at a steep 15% interest rate from Hercules Technology Growth Capital. Because OCZ put in their own firm as collateral for the loan, Hercules Technology Growth Capital would gain ownership of OCZ if OCZ failed to repay the loan. After failing to meet the term of the loan, it was extended to June 2014, with the share price dropping 40% on November 4, 2013. On November 25, 2013, Hercules took control of OCZ's bank accounts because it

87-481: A 1 TB capacity. In November 2010, OCZ acquired intellectual property from Solid Data Inc., for Fibre Channel , SAS, and controller assets for solid state drives. The cost was approximately $ 950,000, paid with restricted common stock and cash. OCZ discontinued all RAM production, citing poor market performance and the weakening global DRAM market, by the end of their 2010 fiscal year on February 28, 2011. In March 2011, OCZ acquired Indilinx Company, Limited,

116-454: A given number of RPMs fully describes the capabilities of the engine. The specific number of IOPS possible in any system configuration will vary greatly, depending upon the variables the tester enters into the program, including the balance of read and write operations, the mix of sequential and random access patterns, the number of worker threads and queue depth, as well as the data block sizes. There are other factors which can also affect

145-457: A privately-held fabless provider of flash controller silicon and software for SSDs, for approximately $ 32 million of OCZ common stock. On October 5, 2011, OCZ announced an intent to acquire PLX Technology 's Abingdon R&D department (formerly Oxford Semiconductor), which specializes in storage SoC development. In 2012 OCZ acquired Sanrad Inc., a privately-held provider of flash caching and virtualization software and hardware from

174-415: Is a term describing a group of elements (such as data in a memory array or a disk file or on magnetic-tape data storage ) being accessed in a predetermined, ordered sequence . It is the opposite of random access , the ability to access an arbitrary element of a sequence as easily and efficiently as any other at any time. Sequential access is sometimes the only way of accessing the data, for example if it

203-577: Is on a tape. It may also be the access method of choice, for example if all that is wanted is to process a sequence of data elements in order. There is no consistent definition in computer science of sequential access or sequentiality. In fact, different sequentiality definitions can lead to different sequentiality quantification results. In spatial dimension, request size, stride distance, backward accesses, re-accesses can affect sequentiality. For temporal sequentiality, characteristics such as multi-stream and inter-arrival time threshold has impact on

232-616: The London Stock Exchange Alternative Investment Market (LSE AIM), with the ticker symbol "OCZ". On May 25, 2007, OCZ acquired PC Power & Cooling , whose products include power supplies. PC Power & Cooling is in Carlsbad, California . It operated as a separate satellite office for OCZ and maintained its own product lines, although OCZ later launched OCZ-branded power supply models as well. In early March 2009, OCZ announced their intent to delist from

261-675: The OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 PCIe using the SandForce controller, have shown much higher sustained write performance that more closely matches the read speed. For example, a typical operating system has many small files (such as DLLs ≤ 128 kB), so SSD is more suitable for system drive. Block size used when testing significantly affects the number of IOPS performed by a given drive. See below for some typical performance figures: (4 KB block, random) (64 KB block, random) (512 KB block, random) Sequential access Sequential access

290-533: The RAD Group ; Sanrad became the OCZ Israel office. Reports in 2012 indicated that a possible acquisition of OCZ by Seagate Technology fell through. On September 17, 2012, founder and CEO Ryan Petersen was fired by his board of directors , and chief marketing officer Alex Mei was appointed as interim CEO. Media outlets speculated that Ryan was ousted by the board of directors. In the early 2010s, SSD devices with

319-565: The Western Digital Raptor and Seagate Barracuda NL will improve by nearly 100% with deep queues. High-end SCSI drives more commonly found in servers, generally show much greater improvement, with the Seagate Savvio exceeding 400 IOPS—more than doubling its performance. While traditional HDDs have about the same IOPS for read and write operations, many NAND flash-based SSDs and USB sticks are much slower writing than reading due to

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348-462: The 128 GB Octane had a return rate of 52.07%. No other company had any SSDs with a return rate of over 5% from this retailer in the data set that was published on March 5, 2013. In a dataset published on April 30, 2014, OCZ again had the highest return rates from the same anonymous retailer. The next dataset, published on November 6, 2014, shows only one OCZ drive, the OCZ Agility 3 480 GB, which had

377-613: The IOPS delivered by the Intel X25-E 64 GB G1 started around 10000 IOPs, and dropped sharply after 8 minutes to 4000 IOPS, and continued to decrease gradually for the next 42 minutes. IOPS vary between 3000 and 4000 from approximately 50 minutes and onwards, for the rest of the 8+ hours the test ran. Even with the drop in random IOPS after the 50th minute, the X25-E still has much higher IOPS compared to traditional hard disk drives. Some SSDs, including

406-504: The IOPS results including the system setup, storage drivers, OS background operations etc. Also, when testing SSDs in particular, there are preconditioning considerations that must be taken into account. The most common performance characteristics measured are sequential and random operations. Sequential operations access locations on the storage device in a contiguous manner and are generally associated with large data transfer sizes, e.g. ≥ 128  kB . Random operations access locations on

435-557: The LSE to pursue a listing on an American stock exchange. On April 24, 2010, OCZ announced a listing on NASDAQ with the ticker symbol "OCZ". In September 2010 OCZ announced the RevoDrive, which is a bootable PCI-E drive for the enthusiast market. It also recently announced an SSD interface called High Speed Data Link (HSDL), which is a PCIe/SAS hybrid interface, along with corresponding products to implement it. As of 2012, OCZ's SSDs offered up to

464-520: The NASDAQ gave OCZ until September 16, 2013 to file its delayed earnings. The company was several quarters late in filing and restated earnings back to 2008. On September 12, 2013, the company disclosed it would not meet the deadline, which was then extended to October 7. 2013 saw OCZ's revenue fall steeply from $ 88.6 million in the second fiscal quarter of 2012 to $ 33.5 million in the second fiscal quarter of 2013, while financial losses increased. OCZ took

493-561: The OCZ brand that use SATA III , PCI Express , Serial attached SCSI and USB 3.0 interfaces, for both client and enterprise applications were produced and marketed. OCZ-branded power supply units were also manufactured. On October 10, 2012, OCZ appointed board member Ralph Schmitt as the company's president and CEO. Schmitt joined OCZ from PLX, where he served as president and CEO since 2008. Several shareholder lawsuits revolved around questionable accounting practices during 2012. In May 2013

522-559: The SEC's charges without admitting the allegations against him. As of 2015, the SEC's litigation continued against Petersen, and finally came to a close in 2017. On November 27, 2013, OCZ Technology stock was halted. OCZ then stated they expected to file a petition for bankruptcy and that Toshiba Corporation had expressed interest in purchasing its assets in a bankruptcy proceeding. On December 2, 2013, OCZ announced Toshiba had agreed to purchase nearly all of OCZ's assets for $ 35 million. The deal

551-540: The definition of sequentiality. In data structures , a data structure is said to have sequential access if one can only visit the values it contains in one particular order. The canonical example is the linked list . Indexing into a list that has sequential access requires O ( n ) time, where n is the index. As a result, many algorithms such as quicksort and binary search degenerate into bad algorithms that are even less efficient than their naive alternatives; these algorithms are impractical without random access . On

580-444: The inability to rewrite directly into a previously written location forcing a procedure called garbage collection . This has caused hardware test sites to start to provide independently measured results when testing IOPS performance. Flash SSDs, such as the Intel X25-E (released 2010), have much higher IOPS than traditional HDD. In a test done by Xssist, using Iometer , 4 KB random transfers, 70/30 read/write ratio, queue depth 4,

609-425: The number of outstanding IOs (i.e. queue depth) increases. This is usually the result of more advanced controller logic on the drive performing command queuing and reordering commonly called either Tagged Command Queuing (TCQ) or Native Command Queuing (NCQ). Many consumer SATA HDDs either cannot do this, or their implementation is so poor that no performance benefit can be seen. Enterprise class SATA HDDs, such as

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638-467: The other hand, some algorithms, typically those that do not have index, require only sequential access, such as mergesort , and face no penalty. OCZ OCZ was a brand of Toshiba that was used for some of its solid-state drives (SSDs) before they were rebranded with Toshiba. OCZ Storage Solutions was a manufacturer of SSDs based in San Jose, California , USA and was the new company formed after

667-510: The sale of OCZ Technology Group ' s SSD assets to Toshiba Corporation . Since entering the memory market as OCZ Technology in 2002, the company has targeted its products primarily at the computer hardware enthusiast market, producing performance DDR SDRAM , video cards , USB drives , power supply units , and various cooling products. OCZ Storage Solutions was dissolved on April 1, 2016 and absorbed into Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc, which later then became Kioxia . OCZ

696-448: The storage device in a non-contiguous manner and are generally associated with small data transfer sizes, e.g. 4 kB. The most common performance characteristics are as follows: For HDDs and similar electromechanical storage devices, the random IOPS numbers are primarily dependent upon the storage device's random seek time , whereas, for SSDs and similar solid state storage devices, the random IOPS numbers are primarily dependent upon

725-612: The storage device's internal controller and memory interface speeds. On both types of storage devices, the sequential IOPS numbers (especially when using a large block size) typically indicate the maximum sustained bandwidth that the storage device can handle. Often sequential IOPS are reported as a simple Megabytes per second number as follows: IOPS × TransferSizeInBytes = BytesPerSec {\displaystyle {\text{IOPS}}\times {\text{TransferSizeInBytes}}={\text{BytesPerSec}}} (then converted to MB/s ) Some HDDs/SSDs will improve in performance as

754-492: Was completed on January 21, 2014 when the assets of OCZ Technology Group became a new independently operated subsidiary of Toshiba named OCZ Storage Solutions. OCZ Technology Group then changed its name to ZCO Liquidating Corporation; on August 18, 2014, ZCO Liquidating Corporation and its subsidiaries were liquidated. In February 2014, the PC Power & Cooling subsidiary was sold to FirePower Technology. OCZ Storage Solutions

783-634: Was dissolved on April 1, 2016 and absorbed into Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc., with OCZ becoming a brand of Toshiba. Toshiba later reorganized its memory products division under a new company and brand, Kioxia . OCZ-branded SSDs were notable for high failure rates. Two lines from the old OCZ Technology Group, the Petrol and the SATA II versions of the Octane, had return rates of over 40% at one anonymous French technology online retailer. The SATA II version of

812-632: Was not in compliance with the conditions of the loan. The Securities and Exchange Commission charged former CEO Ryan Petersen and former CFO Arthur Knap for accounting failures. In a complaint filed in the Northern District of California , the SEC alleged that OCZ's former CEO Ryan Petersen engaged in a scheme to materially inflate OCZ's revenues and gross margins from 2010 to 2012. It separately charged OCZ's former chief financial officer Arthur Knapp for certain accounting, disclosure, and internal accounting controls failures at OCZ. Knapp agreed to settle

841-531: Was originally called "The Overclockerz Store" when it was founded by Ryan Petersen in 2000 selling overclocked Athlon processors. San Jose, California-based OCZ Technology Group, Inc. was founded in 2002 by Ryan Petersen and Bhulinder Sethi. OCZ maintained satellite offices in The Netherlands, United Kingdom, and Israel along with manufacturing and logistics facilities in Taiwan. In June 2006, OCZ went public on

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