OCZ Technology Group, Inc. has signed an asset purchase agreement with Toshiba to acquire substantially all of OCZ's assets in a chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding for $35M. Under this agreement Toshiba will acquire OCZ's client and enterprise solid state drive business. OCZ will continue to operate and serve existing and future customers during this process. Toshiba has agreed to provide OCZ with DIP (Debtor-in-Possession) financing to ensure that there is adequate capital and flash supply to support the business during the contemplated sale period. The consummation of the asset purchase agreement is subject to an auction and approval by the bankruptcy court in OCZ's bankruptcy case.

This acquisition will provide Toshiba with access to OCZ's proprietary controllers, firmware and software, as well as the teams responsible for bringing these solutions to market, in addition to OCZ's brand and sales channels. This strategic opportunity will bring critical controller IP and NAND supply all under one global organization.

"Over the past year, OCZ has dealt with numerous issues which have stressed the company's capital structure and operating model, posing a challenge to achieving near term profitability. The combination of NAND flash supply constraints and credit issues have impacted our ability to satisfy the demands of our customers; this combined with increased pricing pressure in our industry have contributed to our on-going operating losses. On an operational basis, we completed a complex investigation, several restructurings and a multi-year restatement that added significantly to our working capital requirements," stated Ralph Schmitt, CEO of OCZ. "We have been working diligently on this partnership with Toshiba and we believe that this is the best outcome under our current corporate conditions."

"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."

This transaction has been approved by the Board of Directors of OCZ, and it is expected that the sale will close within approximately 60 days.

Seperately, Toshiba will expand its family of enterprise SSD with new models designed to support read intensive applications. The new "PX03SN series" will start shipping from the end of this month.



"PX03SN series" SSD have a 2.5-inch form factor, implement an SAS interface, and will be available in capacities up to 1.6 TB. The drives are based on Toshiba's 19nm MLC NAND, support one full DWPD and are suited for server and storage systems for online transactions, cloud computing, online gaming and big data analytics.

The 200GB, 400GB and 800GB eSSDs reach sequential read speeds of 1,100MiB/s while the 1.6TB PX03SNB160 achieves sequential read speeds of 1,060MiB/s. All drives deliver sequential write speeds up to 380MiB/s, random write speeds up to 26,000 IOPS and random read speeds up to 130,000 IOPS.

The PX03SNx series also incorporates power loss protection as well as Toshiba?s Quadruple Swing-By Code (QSBC) for improved error correction and reliability.

Model	PX03SNB160	PX03SNF080	PX03SNF040	PX03SNF020
Basic specification
Interface	SAS-3.0 (12.0Gbit/s, 6.0Gbit/s, 3.0Gbit/s, 1.5Gbit/s)
NAND technology	19nm MLC
Capacity	1600GB	800GB	400GB	200GB
Logical data block length	512, 520, 528, 4096, 4104, 4160, 4224 B (fixed length)
Sustained 64KiB Sequential Read	1,060 MiB/s	1,100 MiB/s
Sustained 64KiB Sequential Write	380 MiB/s
Sustained 4KiB Random Read	130,000 IOPS
Sustained 4kiB Random Write	26,000 IOPS
Reliability
MTTF	2,000,000 hours
Operating Condition	24 hours/day, 7days/week
Service life	5 years
TBW	2,920TB	1,460TB	730TB	365TB
Power requirment
Regulation	5 V ± 5%, 12 V ± 5%
Power consumption
Power consumption Ready (Idle A)	3.6 W Typ.	2.7 W Typ.
Power consumption efficiency	19,500 IOPS/W	24,400 IOPS/W
Dimension
Height	15.0 mm +0, -0.5 mm	7.0 mm +0, -0.5 mm
Width	69.85 ± 0.25 mm
Length	100.45 mm Max.
Weight	170 g Max.	70 g Max.
Temperature
Operating	0 to 55°C
Non-Operating	-40 to 70°C
Vibration/Shock
Vibration (Operating)	21.27 m/s2 {2.17Grms} (5 to 800Hz)
Vibration (Non-operating)	159.74 m/s2 {16.3Grms} (20 to 2000Hz)
Shock (Operating)	9,800 m/s2 {1,000G} / 0.5 ms duration
Shock (Non-operating)	9,800 m/s2 {1,000G} / 0.5 ms duration
Security
Self Encryption Drive	NO
Sanitize Instant Erase	NO
Others
Power Loss Protection	YES