AMD Launches Radeon R7 Series Solid State Drives With OCZ

MojoKid (1002251) writes AMD is launching a new family of products today, but unless you follow the rumor mill closely, it's probably not something you'd expect. It's not a new CPU, APU, or GPU. Today, AMD is launching its first line of solid state drives (SSDs), targeted squarely at AMD enthusiasts. AMD is calling the new family of drives, the Radeon R7 Series SSD, similar to its popular mid-range line of graphics cards. The new Radeon R7 Series SSDs feature OCZ and Toshiba technology, but with a proprietary firmware geared towards write performance and high endurance. Open up one of AMD's new SSDs and you'll see OCZ's Indilinx Barefoot 3 M00 controller on board—the same controller used in the OCZ Vector 150, though it is clocked higher in these drives. That controller is paired to A19nm Toshiba MLC (Multi-Level Cell) NAND flash memory and a DDR3-1333MHz DRAM cache. The 120GB and 240GB drives sport 512MB of cache memory, while the 480GB model will be outfitted with 1GB. Interestingly enough, AMD Radeon R7 Series SSDs are some of the all-around, highest-performing SATA SSDs tested to date. IOPS performance is among the best seen in a consumer-class SSD, write throughput and access times are highly-competitive across the board, and the drive offered consistent performance regardless of the data type being transferred. Read performance is also strong, though not quite as stand-out as write performance.

Re: Marginally better

[arielCo]

I knew someone would bring up OCZ's reputation. News flash: they've been wholly owned by Toshiba [ocz.com] since January. Why they decided to keep the tarnished brand is a mystery to me.

Fast, reliable, not expensive = win

[javipas]

Seems a good bet if you want reliability: in the last paragraph of Guru3D's review [guru3d.com], they say:

the AMD Radeon R7 SSD series is very fast, has a greatly refined Barefoot controller with accompanying firmware and Toshiba's latest A19nm NAND flash memory. It is a product you'll like and use for a long time. I also dare to state that it is one of the most reliable product on the market anno 2014, combined with the excellent new ShieldPlus warranty this is a pure win in our book, and as such it comes very much recommended by Guru3D.com

Maybe an OCZ with a sticker, but who cares, really? Quality product, good price. Not much to hate here.

Re:Marginally better

[rwise2112]

At least Amazon has a track record of making decent hardware. The existing Kindle products are pretty nice.

OCZ has a track record of making terrible SSDs.

AMD are giving these a 4 yr warranty, which means they must have some faith in them.