Mirroring the arguments over Xbox versus PlayStation, Mac versus PC, and Coke versus Pepsi, PC gamers have their own perpetual debate: AMD or Intel? (And, by extension, Radeon versus GeForce.) If you come down on the AMD side of things, you’ll soon be able to kit your gaming PC out with a new branded component: AMD is getting into the SSD game.
AMD Radeon R7 SSD: Australian Review
Robert Hallock, one of AMD’s technical experts, said the R7 SSDs come as a response to questions from potential customers: “People come to us on Twitter and other social media, to ask ‘will you be making other components?’ And the answer is yes. We’re taking the successes that we found [with graphics and CPUs], and applying it to the SSD market.” AMD already has its own CPUs, graphics cards through its 2006 takeover of ATI, a new line of AMD Memory and now, Radeon SSDs.
Hallock again: “This will help gamers build the all-AMD system that they’re looking for. If they’re not, that’s fine too.” It’s true — apart from a case and power supply, every component in your PC can be supplied by AMD. If you don’t have a setup like that (and most people won’t, since Intel has been pretty dominant in processors in the last few years, that’s fine — the Radeon SSD isn’t tied in any way to using an AMD CPU or a Radeon graphics card; it’ll be perfectly at home in an Intel system running Nvidia graphics.
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The drives themselves are manufactured under contract by OCZ, using parent company Toshiba’s advanced 19nm flash memory manufacturing processes. The R7 is the first mid-range SSD to use the new flash, which boasts both reliability improvements and a slight performance bump: “It’s the first gaming drive to use Toshiba’s A19 NAND memory. There are cost and performance advantages [over Toshiba’s older 19nm NAND]. This could be considered the second-generation NAND — we are using the latest and greatest from Toshiba, [and] these are the first gaming drives to use it. We’ve worked with OCZ to make custom firmware.”
550MBps reads and 500MBps writes are claimed, although the smallest-capacity 120GB model can only handle 440MBps writes. The new Radeon SSDs will also ship with Acronis TrueImage, which lets users clone their existing drive onto the new SSD — pretty standard for a new premium drive. The new R7 SSDs are apparently much more reliable and disaster-resilient than anything else in their mid-market price range, with a mean time before failure (MTBF) figure of 2.3 million hours versus something like OCZ’s own Vertex 460’s 2 million hours and the Samsung 840 EVO’s 1.5 million.
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Hallock says the new drives are aimed at gamers, but not necessarily the absolute top of the market: “We’ve designed the R7 series to be a good balance between price and performance. It’s not the most powerful drive, [but] we want something that’s a sensible combination — and that’s why we chose the R7 name, we just think it fits.” R7 is, of course, a reference to AMD’s mid-range Radeon R7 graphics card line-up, currently spanning the cheap R7 240 to the mainstream R7 265.
AMD is giving its SSDs a four-year warranty, versus the competition’s three years or less, which it hopes will be another selling point. 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB capacities will be available; there’s no 1TB option, reflecting the R7’s mainstream appeal — although potentially annoying anyone keen on using the R7 as an all-in-one system drive. AMD hasn’t released prices for the R7 series in Australia just yet, but going on the $190 cheapest street price of the 240GB OCZ Vertex 460 and the $210 cheapest street price of the 240GB OCZ Vector 150, the 240GB R7 should be right around the $200 mark — well under $1 per GB. [AMD]