AMD Radeon R7 Series 240GB SSD Review

AMD’s new line of Radeon R7 series SSDs are outfitted with sturdy, anodized black housings that are significantly heavier than many competing products. As far as first impressions go, the look and solid feel of the drives definitely convey a sense of quality right out of the box.

All of the drives in AMD’s initial line-up conform to the 2.5” form factor common of today’s SSDs, and they all have slim 7mm Z-Heights. The enclosures used on the drives are all metal (top and bottom) and, as we’ve mentioned, they are clearly sturdier than most other consumer-class SSDs we’ve tested. There are really no external features to speak off other than a few decals and the standard SATA power and data connectors, but that’s par for the course.

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 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.

Note that these new AMD Radeon R7 drives have about 6.25 – 6.66% of their NAND capacity over provisioned. The 120GB drive features 128GB of NAND, the 240GB drive 256GB of NAND, and the 480GB drive 512GB of NAND. That additional spare area is reserved for wear leveling and other proprietary features and aids the drives in achieving their higher endurance ratings.

AMD’s Radeon R7 series drives are all rated for max read speeds of 550MB/s, but write performance varies between the models. The 120GB drive’s writes peak at 470MB/s; the 240GB and 480GB drives top out at 530MB/s. All of the drives support TRIM, 256-bit AES compliant encryption and they’re rated for 30GB/day host writes for 4 years, under typical client workloads. Idle power is listed at .6w. Active power at 2.7W.

AMD / OCZ also offers a 4 year warranty on the drives, which is 25% longer than most other consumer-class SSDs.