SSD of the Week – AMD Radeon R7

We hope you have been enjoying the holidays and to all we wish you a happy new year! To end the week, our SSD of the Week will be highlighting a newcomer’s introduction to the SSD market, AMD’s Radeon R7. This gamer oriented SSD continues to expand AMD’s Radeon product diversity.

For their first step, they have decided to partner with OCZ, a strategic move as OCZ is now property of Toshiba, who happens to manufacture some of the best NAND in the industry. This ensures continuous supply and support on their end so AMD shouldn’t run into any issues with product supply for demand.

 

AMD’s Radeon R7 SSDs are available in capacities of 120GB ($74.99), 240GB ($144.99), and 480GB (260.99). It comes in a 7mm 2.5″ form factor and comes with 256-bit AES compliant encryption support. Specification ratings include a 2.5 million hours MTBF and an endurance rating of 30GB a day for 4 years (4-yr warranty), which leaves it in the middle of the product line shown below. There is also a complete migration package to include a desktop adapter and  a copy of Acronis HD cloning software that may be downloaded.

Performance is listed as 550MB/s read for all capacities, along with 530MB/s write for the 240 and 480GB sizes, and 470MB/s for the 120GB capacity. IOPS are listed at 100K read and 90K write for the 480GB, 95K read and 90K write for the 240GB, and 85K read and 90K write for the 120 GB capacity.

Inside, it utilizes a Barefoot 3 M00 controller and Toshiba A19 19nm NAND flash memory. As you can already tell by the listed capacities, the R7 line of SSDs take advantage of 7% over provisioning to enhance their performance in both typical light consumer workloads, such as gaming, and even heavy constant write workloads.

 

 

 

From our PCMark 8 consistency testing, the performance of this drive is up there with the best, almost as good as the SanDisk Extreme Pro. Latency stays below 0.1ms throughout the tests and bandwidth stays above most of the competition compared.

Back in our review, it even earned our bronze seal. So, if you are an AMD loyalist or a big gamer, definitely check out the AMD Radeon R7. It is a quality product that will continue to great performance no matter how hard you work it.

Check out the AMD Radeon R7 SSD on Amazon today!