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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.
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 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.
Maybe an OCZ with a sticker, but who cares, really? Quality product, good price. Not much to hate here.
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"
Usually you're buying through a website that has pictures and the word "SSD" next to it, so unless you're mailing them a letter with some cash asking for an R7 I dont think its gonna be that big of a problem. The sorts of people who buy (and know how to install) SSDs and GPUs tend to be the sorts of people who can differentiate the two.
Not that its not dumb, just that its not really a big problem.
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.
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.
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.
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.