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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.
The R7 series originally referred to the GPU. What happens when I order a GPU and they ship me a hard drive instead?
Someone at AMD isn't thinking very hard about this.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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.
I'm glad to see AMD is using their development budget wisely and not wasting it on other stuff, like it making their x86 cores competitive versus Intel
I knew someone would bring up OCZ's reputation. News flash: they've been wholly owned by Toshiba since January. Why they decided to keep the tarnished brand is a mystery to me.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
I realize that it is entirely anecdotal, but my miserable early experience with OCZ disks seems to match others, to the point that would never in a million years purchase another OCZ product again. Heck, it seems mighty telling that they're not even considered on the tech report longetivity test:
http://techreport.com/review/2...
AMD has already sold badge engineered RAM some years ago. Just looked up, they actually still do
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Maybe an OCZ with a sticker, but who cares, really? Quality product, good price. Not much to hate here.
This is going to backfire horribly. First, it should never have gotten a Radeon name, let alone Radeon R7, which is a (damn good) GPU product line. Second, they partnered with the worst, shittiest name-brand SSD vendor. Of course there are much worse SSDs, but those are all generic crap. OCZ is known to take short-cuts in the name of speed, and screw it up when it comes to reliability.
nVidia tried something like this once, anyone remember their chipsets? It was *UTTER CRAP* full of errata, and with support so bad the kernel guys went nearly insane trying to suport it and add workarounds for the worst chipset bugs. nVidia sourced the crappiest "IP" they could to put inside the chipset (so no, it was not their own design, just a mash-up of bought designs from others), and it didn't end up well.
Whomever came up with this idea inside AMD needs to be outed, he is certainly going to get (directly or indirectly) a very major compensation package from Intel soon... for destroying one of AMD's most valuable product brand names.
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.
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
nVidia actually did sell it pretty well though. It wasn't in any way a better experience, but the brand name did actually carry the product as I recall.
It was one of the reasons that the relationship between Intel and nVidia went so far south, Intel made it impossible to have third party chipsets and nVidia lost some revenue opportunity. People rightly critical of the technical aspects were not the downfall of the product line, Intel locking down their platform was.
In short, this stuff *could* in theory fly. In practice, I don't think AMD has the brand strength. People still seem to look to nVidia as 'the go-to' brand more often than AMD in the PC component world.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Considering how a lot of problems with SSDs are generally related to various obscure firmware bugs and considering just how horrible ATI/AMD is at writing software for their hardware, I would run for my fucking life.
> firmware geared towards write performance and high endurance
because stock firmware was geared towards slowness and losing data ...
>480GB
>Endurance Rated for 30GB/day host writes for 4 years under typical client workloads
for math challenged: this is 43TB of written data, after that your guarantee is VOID and NULL
43TB on a 480TB drive, this is more than a joke, this is spitting in your face. This comes from Toshiba - manufacturer of both controller and flash memory, party that is best informed about REAL endurance capabilities of that combo.
In case you are wondering - Samsung doesnt impose any write limitations on their 3 year guarantee for 840 EVO drives. Both drives look pretty much the same in tests.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Yes, im sure Toshiba knows best how good that drive is
this is why they limit warranty to 43TB of written data ... on a 480GB drive. The LOWEST write limit in the industry.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Like OCZ which bumped theirs up to 5 years before they imploded? Here's the thing, 2014 was a big year for consoles, both the PS4 and XBone sold many millions of consoles all with AMD semi-custom chips. Yet despite this AMD is barely floating with a small operating income and a tiny loss overall. In 2018, what consoles will be selling? Still the PS4 and XBone but a whole lot less of them.
Two vital quotes from their last earnings call "In the desktop space, demand for our desktop APUs was strong from our OEMs. However, the desktop component channel was softer than we expected." "Inventory was $960 million, up $91 million, primarily driven by increased level of our latest 28-nanometer microprocessor products and lower shipments to channel distributors." Read: APUs go unsold. Either they need to lower production or prices or both.
To be fair, they're hanging on better than I expected but their traditional business still points downwards and breaking new ground is hard. And unless they can turn the trend, it needs to grow a lot and fast to make up for the business that we can see slipping. I wouldn't exactly be sure that AMD will be around to honor that warranty in four years.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Their claim is they are focusing on reliability and write endurance but it looks like they have some of the lowest endurance in the industry.
Even the drive it is supposed to be a bit of a clone from is rated much higher.
AMD R7: 4GB for 4 years = 43TB (Odd that they don't say this is dependent on drive size, which it would be.
OCZ Vector 150: 50GB for 5 years = 91 TB (Also not scaled for drive size)
Samsung 840: 1000 cycles. In their smallest drive this would be around 120 TB. Samsung is using lower endurance TLC here so this is even more odd.
Intel 730: 70TB over their 5 year warranty is 127 TB Highest of them all for MLC.
Now in real life, the AMD and OCZ drives may go much further before they fail, but you have to go off of their ratings for comparisons or all hell breaks loose (Tests have shown the Samsung drives lasting over 3000 cycles before beginning to reallocate sectors). Especially for the larger drives (A 240GB drive should have double the write endurance of a 120GB drive).
So yeah I find it odd that endurance is one of their talking points when they have by far the lowest endurance of any of the common drives out there, including the supposedly very similar Vector 150.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
OCZ used to give pretty good warranties, too....right up until the moment company collapsed under the weight of all the returns.
Still, AMD are bigger than OCZ and I'm sure that having a shiny new replacement drive every few months will totally compensate you for the loss of data and hassle of rebuilding your system.
Look up "drawn and quartered".
Or look up "wishbone".
Somebody has to say it. Anybody who would so much as touch with a 10 foot pole any SSD contaminated with the OCZ brand needs to have his head examined. Please, don't anybody claim they don't know the sad infamous history of OCZ SSDs.
Govconnection, which is one of our vendors, quite often has no pictures on their products, and minimal descriptions. Ordering the wrong thing because two products had a similar name would be a real possibility.
Sorry, but no way in hell.
OCZ crashed and burned its goodwill in the industry for a reason.
Toshiba, one of the most customer-hostile electronics companies I've ever come across bought them.
Sure, Toshiba COULD have improved the OCZ line drastically. At this point, it's a Zenith-type brand label and nothing more.
And if it means having to deal with those noxious pricks at Toshiba? NO FUCKING WAY IN HELL!
I'd rather buy something like a 1TB Samsung 850 Pro and film myself:
Running software to burn it over it's write limits till it dies.
Repeatedly throw it on the ground from the top of a 10 story building.
Run over it with a forklift a couple times.
Douse it in lighter fluid and light it up.
Wipe my ass with the remains.
Emasculate myself with an ice cream scooper.
Then try to the drive, the video and the schlong into Samsung demanding warranty service.
I'd have better luck with everything working out okay than I would for even a minor problem with Toshiba.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Which means you could easily wind up with one of these.
You're working with a brain-dead government vendor, a fact which doesn't surprise me in the least.
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
Somewhat inexpensive, but not quite so cheap that losing a SSD to a premature defect wouldn't sting a bit. In my neck of the woods, a 256GB SSD still costs around 150 Euros.
Unlike GP, I might take a chance on a product with less than 5 years of warranty if the vendor has a track record for good quality. OCZ does not, and I doubt if the acquisition by Toshiba has instantly fixed things. Or if Toshiba branded SSDs have not suffered from the bad influence ;-)
So Toshiba would have to offer a good warranty, where others may get a free pass.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Why would Toshiba having bought OCZ make me any more willing to trust them? I've been burned far worse by Toshiba (whose salespeople lied to me to make a sale and whose support people refused to honour my warranty) than by OCZ.
Thats why you have a sales rep...
I've dealt with those sites, the proper solution is to get a quote from the rep so that when the wrong thing was ordered its no longer your problem.