With the Radeon R7 SSD series AMD is launching their first solid state drive and at the same time OCZ has now a rather interesting customer at hand to grow their foundry business. Based on OCZs proven Barefoot 3 M00 controller and combined with Toshiba A19nm NAND flash AMD appears to be capable of offering a quick drive with very reasonable endurance rating. At this point we're curious to find out whether AMD succeeded with their plan or not.


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Specifications / Delivery

Model	AMD Radeon R7 SSD 120 Gigabyte	AMD Radeon R7 SSD 240 Gigabyte	AMD Radeon R7 SSD 480 Gigabyte
Capacity	120 GB	240 GB	480 GB
Form Factor	2.5'', 7 mm	2.5'', 7 mm	2.5'', 7 mm
Memory	MLC NAND Toshiba A19nm	MLC NAND Toshiba A19nm	MLC NAND Toshiba A19nm
Endurance	4 years @ 30 GB/day	4 years @ 30 GB/day	4 years @ 30 GB/day
Controller	Indilinx Barefoot 3	Indilinx Barefoot 3	Indilinx Barefoot 3
Throughput	550 MB/s sequential read 450 MB/s sequential write 80'000 IOPS 4K random read 95'000 IOPS 4K random write	550 MB/s sequential read 530 MB/s sequential write 90'000 IOPS 4K random read 95'000 IOPS 4K random write	550 MB/s sequential read 530 MB/s sequential write 100'000 IOPS 4K random read 95'000 IOPS 4K random write
Accesstime (read)	< 0.1 ms	< 0.1 ms	< 0.1 ms
Acoustics	no noise	no noise	no noise
Warranty	5 Years	5 Years	5 Years
Price	xxx USD	xxx USD	xxx USD

With the Radeon R7 SSD AMD as well as OCZ are going new ways. Looking at the situation from AMDs point of view, they’re making another step towards creating their Radeon based Gaming-PC, since meanwhile AMD offers CPUs, graphics cards, memory as well as SSDs. On the other hand there is OCZ taking quite a big step into the foundry business and with AMD they certainly managed to score an interesting customer.

Having a closer look at the Radeon R7 SSD shows there is a Barefoot 3 M00 controller, which can also be found in OCZs Vector 150 drive. Other than that there is Toshiba A19nm NAND, which OCZ is using with their Arc 100 SSDs. If you keep in mind, that the Vector 150 is OCZs flagship SATA SSD and the Arc 100 their entry-level offering, you might already realize how AMD is positioning the Radeon R7 Series SSD on the market. What they’re actually doing is creating a gaming category, which they put in between enthusiast and entry-level. This is also being reflected by the drives endurance rating. The Radeon R7 Series SSDs are rated for 30 Gigabyte of host writes per day over a time period of four years, which again puts it in between the Vector 150 and the Arc 100.

With their Radeon R7 Series SSDs, AMD is also to benefit from OCZs new Shield Plus warranty. In this case no proof of purchase is needed in order to qualify for support. Should a customer experience issues with a drive it's enough to mention the serial number when opening a support ticket. A customer service representative will then take over the case and find the most suitable solution. Should the drive be defective the customer will receive a pre-paid return label as well as a new drive.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 7 - Random read KByte/s
Page 2 - Impressions	Page 8 - Random write IOPS
Page 3 - How do we test?	Page 9 - Random read IOPS
Page 4 - Sequential write KByte/s	Page 10 - QD1/4/8/16/32 Performance
Page 5 - Sequential read KByte/s	Page 11 - Conclusion
Page 6 - Random write KByte/s