AMD Radeon R7 240GB: OCZ SSD with AMD sauce

Cons

• High price
• Not very fast

AMD, in collaboration with OCZ, has launched its first series of solid state drives. AMD previously worked with Dataram to market DDR3 RAM under the Radeon flag. The collaboration with OCZ has resulted in the R7 SSD series, which is available in capacities of 120GB, 240GB and 480GB.

To justify that hefty price, which will still fall in practice, the Radeon R7 series must come from a good house. Since AMD itself obviously has no facilities or know-how for the production of solid state drives, the drives are made by OCZ and OCZ has not reinvented the wheel for this. The R7 series is a hybrid of the OCZ Vector 150 drive and the Arc100 series.

The Barefoot 3 M00 controller is used in the Radeon R7 SSDs, just like the Vector 150. However, it then controls Toshiba A19nm flash chips, which can also be found in the Arc100 SSDs. A cache memory of two times 256MB completes the circuit board of the R7. The controller and especially the firmware for the controller have been tweaked a bit for the AMD SSDs. For example, the lifespan has been adjusted and must be four years if 30GB of data is written every day.

We have tested the drive against our full SSD protocol, but are only showing the results of the traces and power consumption here. The rest of the benchmarks can be found in the bench-db, via the links in the right column. The traces and the absorbed power are the most relevant to get an impression of the performance for daily use. We compare the Radeon R7 SSD with the Arc 100, Vertex and Vector 150 from OCZ, and with the most popular drives, such as the MX100 from Crucial and the Samsung 840 Evo.

In our traces, which most realistically approach daily use, both the Radeon 7 and the Arc 100 perform only moderately. The Arc 100 is a pure budget drive, so we can forgive that, but the Radeon 7 is aimed at gamers and is a bit more expensive. The performance of that AMD drive is slightly better than that of the Arc 100, but the SSD is still a mid-range at best.

The power consumption of the OCZ drives, including the Radeon 7, is the same for all four drives when idle. The differences are also very minor with the random writes, but the Radeon 7 requires a little more energy with the sequential writes.

In addition to the 240GB variants we tested, both the OCZ Arc 100 and the AMD Radeon 7 are available in capacities of 120GB and 480GB. Compared to its most popular competitors, the Crucial MX100 and M500, and Samsung’s 840 Evo drive, the Arc 100 is still too expensive. We still have to wait and see the prices of the AMD Radeon 7.

With the acquisition of Indilinx, OCZ had already brought the production of controllers in-house and with the acquisition by Toshiba, OCZ can compete on price. Just like Crucial and Samsung, OCZ can now make complete SSDs in-house. That offers the opportunity to compete on price, but for the time being that is not very successful with the Arc 100; at the time of writing, the drives are still about ten cents per gigabyte too expensive.

For the AMD drives, we can only calculate recommended prices for the time being. They are 75 cents per gigabyte for the 120GB drive and about 62 cents and 50 cents for the larger drives. That is certainly too expensive in the smaller capacities for what the drive offers. The main reason to choose this SSD would therefore be mainly a Radeon preference; you can build a Radeon video card, Radeon memory and now a Radeon SSD into your gaming system.