Toshiba has completed its acquisition of OCZ Storage Solutions, a failed Silicon Valley maker of solid-state drives, the company said Tuesday.
Solid-state drives are storage components built with flash memory that are intended to replace spinning disks in laptops, desktop computers and servers. They offer lower power consumption and better performance but are typically more expensive per gigabyte than hard drives.
OCZ said in November last year that it had defaulted on a loan agreement after its business was hit because it was having trouble buying enough flash memory chips for its drives.
Revenue had fallen to US$33.5 million in its most recent quarter, down from $88.6 million in the same period a year earlier. But despite the sharply lower revenue, its losses shrunk to $26.1 million from $33.2 million a year earlier.
At that time, Toshiba said it had offered to buy the company as long as it could maintain the value of its business and keep its employees.
Financial details of the acquisition were not announced.
OCZ will continue to operate independently and be based in San Jose, California. Toshiba is a major manufacturer of flash-memory chips, so it should be able to supply OCZ's SSD manufacturing operations with enough silicon.
The acquisition brings Toshiba OCZ's enterprise and client SSD customers, both markets it intends to keep serving, the company said in a statement.
Martyn Williams covers mobile telecoms, Silicon Valley and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Martyn on Twitter at @martyn_williams. Martyn's e-mail address is martyn_williams@idg.com
