It turns out that a guest took one of the SSD prototypes during OCZ's CES party, held in their hospitality suite. The company had set up a few displays with their products for guests to examine. However, the company's staff noticed the drive was missing towards the end of the party, but didn't make a fuss in order to avoid alarming their guests.

The drive was one of only a handful of prototypes and was estimated to be worth over $1,000, making it a Felony Grand Theft. The company had to make last-minute arrangements in order to retrieve another drive that had been loaned to motherboard maker Gigabyte for their booth.

Fortunately, a member of the CES staff emailed OCZ this morning to notify the company that the drive had been found in the CES Press Room. A piece of paper with the name and email address of OCZ's U.S. Marketing Manager was found, along with “Return review sample to vendor” typed on it.

There really wasn't much that could've been done with the drive except taking a few pictures. There aren't a lot of SuperSpeed USB 3.0 adapters around, so running benchmarks would've been very difficult.

OCZ is just glad that they'll be getting the drive back, but this probably means that someone will have to guard their products at parties in the future. Ouch!