AMD Radeon R7 240GB Solid State Drive Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The AMD Radeon R7 Solid State Drive has a mixed target group, and in a way it manages to hit them all. The drive will speak to many, gamers, AMD fans and enthusiasts alike and it comes with the well known, fair AMD price versus performance point. When factoring in the performance we’ve just seen in our benchmarks, we can safely say that this will be a great buy for anyone. The drive doesn’t have any official listings yet, but it’s announced at an MSRP of £116.95 inc VAT in the U.K, $169 in the U.S and €122 in the EU. Euro price is without VAT as they may vary from country to country. Keep an eye on Overclockers UK for a listing, I’m sure it won’t be long.

Overview

Both OCZ and AMD have their lovers and haters, and there are still some people who haven’t gotten over the Vertex2 time where the manufacturing process had some trouble. But OCZ has long put all those issues behind them and created a lot of great new drives. This cooperation with AMD is no different, when we take OCZ reliability and quality and add the ingenuity of AMD to tweak it, we see a result that is worth showing off.

Being the second drive I test with this configuration, or close to it, I knew the drive would perform great. And it did, it blasted through the benchmarks throwing out one great result after another. Each time very close to the maximum we can get. The overclocked and custom flashed OCZ Barefoot 3 controller in combination with Toshiba’s A19nm MLC NAND let this drive max out its performance over the entire scale.

Further adding to the value of this drive, it comes with adapter bracket and Acronis cloning software, making sure you’re ready to go when you hold your brand new Solid State Drive in your hands. With 4 years of warranty and a rating to write up to 30GB a day, it’s clear that AMD has faith in the drive. And with good reason. There is still room for improvement on this drive, and I have no doubt we’ll see it in form of a firmware update.

We see a steady write and read performance over the entire scale, even after a 3-4 year simulated workload. The drive still gives us the same benchmark figures as when it was new. In a few tests it even performed better. However, the 4K write abilities could have been better, but this is really just to find something bad to say about this drive. That is not an easy task.

Pros:

• Great performance
• Bundled with cloning software and adapter bracket
• Long life time and sustained performance
• Solid build quality
• Long Warranty
• Indilinx Barefoot 3 Controller and Toshiba A19nm NAND

Cons:

• none

Neutral

• The write speeds in the 4K area could be improved.

“The AMD Radeon R7 is one of the best drives on the market. With the added bundle value, great warranty and sustained perfomance, the R7 SSD scores an easy Editor’s Choice Award. If you want a great new SSD for your system, get the Radeon R7.”

Thanks to AMD for providing this review sample.