Introduction, Specifications and Packaging

AMD’s first SSD. How does it hold up?

Introduction:

AMD has been branching their brand out past CPUs for nearly a decade now. Back in 2006, AMD acquired ATI, and their video card branch has been highly competitive ever since. Then in 2011, AMD entered the RAM market by partnering with Patriot and VisionTek. That partnership appears to have been fruitful, along with some additional help in the form of RAMDisk software through an additional partnership with Dataram, as more recently a highly competitive Gamer Series of that RAM was launched. So, CPU's – check, GPU's – check, RAM – check. What's next? Solid State Drives? Sure, why not!

Behold the AMD Radeon R7 SSD!

Ok, so the naming might be a bit confusing for those familiar with AMD's video card line of the same name, so you'll have to be sure to include 'SSD' in your searches if you are looking for one of these on the market. Just like AMD handled the RAM, they have again chosen to partner with another company in the creation of a new product:

…and this time that choice was OCZ. As you can see above, the Radeon R7 is a gamer-oriented SSD, which sits right in between the Vertex 460 and the Vector 150 in OCZ's product lineup. The expectation is performance similar to the Vector, but with a slightly lower warranty and GB/day rating. We also see the inclusion of the lower cost 'advanced' Toshiba A19nm MLC flash, which should help with pricing and get this new SSD into the hands of even more gamers.

Continue reading as we evaluate the new AMD Radeon R7 SSD!

Specifications:

Full specs: Performance across the board looks very similar to both the OCZ Vector 150 and Vertex 460. No surprise really, as all of these products are using the same controller. The Barefoot 3 M00 (Vector 150 / Radeon R7) is a ~12% overclocked version of the M10 (Vertex 150, ARC 100), but in some ways the speed of the flash remains limiting, so this overclock only helps in some areas of perforamnce. Packaging:

Our sample came to us straight from the lab at OCZ, so we couldn't include the bracket pictured below, which will be included in the retail product.