Seagate to buy OCZ?

There’s a rumour going around that Seagate might be considering picking up SSD maker OCZ, a company that it’s nigh on impossible not to have heard of if you’ve ever considered getting an SSD. There isn’t much in terms of details as to why Seagate would want to buy OCZ, but apparently multiple companies have been interested in laying their hands on OCZ.

Over the years there have been a lot of rumours about OCZ, although as to which of these that are true, well, that’s something we’ll most likely never find out. However, since the company moved into the still fairly lucrative SSD market, the company appears to have gone – mostly – from strength to strength. Sometimes it appears as if OCZ has been a little too eager to get new products out in the market, something its customers are far too aware of, with multiple firmware upgrades for some product lines just to make them stable and/or usable.

As far as Seagate is concerned, the company is most likely eyeing OCZ’s PCI Express based enterprise level SSD products, as here the margins are high and the volumes are increasing at a rapid pace. It’s possible that the OEM and retail SSD business holds some interest to Seagate as well, as it’s a line of products that Seagate currently doesn’t offer outside of its Pulsar series of enterprise-class SSDs. OCZ also has a fair share of SSD related patents, least not courtesy of Indilinx which OCZ purchase a few years ago and Seagate has very little in-house related technology ownership here.

Compared to its main rival Western Digital, Seagate has been very slow adopting solid state storage solution and seems to have focused on its Momentus XT hybrid drives instead, a move that never paid off for Seagate. Admittedly, Western Digital doesn’t offer an exciting range of SSD products either, especially as its SiliconEdge Blue drives seemed to do little for the company to gain any kind of ground in the OEM market.

It will be interesting to see how this rumour develops, but if true, the winners are clearly OCZ’s shareholders in the short time, as the company’s shares are up nearly 29 percent. If we’re to believe the original source behind the rumour, Fudzilla.com, then the deal should be done before the start of next week.

Source: Fudzilla.com, Forbes.com

Thanks for posting this, it's an interesting read and will be for all those who like me own ocz ssd drives, may well be good for share holders but not sure if this will be good or bad for us end users.