AMD Radeon R7 SSD 240 GB

[W1zzard]

Today, AMD enters the SSD market with their Radeon R7 SSD, which is built using OCZ technology. Using a Barefoot 3 controller and Toshiba 19 nanometer flash chips, the drive is designed for consumers and gamers alike. AMD has also extended the warranty of their R7 SSD to four years.

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[XL-R8R]

The price-point is a little disappointing.

I was expecting a competitively priced SSD from AMD but I guess thats not meant to happen lol


Maybe if they release an 'R9' edition it will perform better and demand its price.... at the minute, this thing certainly isnt worth $165... not when you can get a Kingston HyperX 240GB model with a copy of Watch Dogs for $145 over at The Egg which will be a far better deal and potentially a better drive over-all.

 

[W1zzard]

The Kingston drives use SandForce, so performance should be pretty much identical. Yet I've seen and experienced lots of issues with SF drives randomly disappearing on newer Intel chipsets like Z97.

 

[XL-R8R]

The Kingston drives use SandForce, so performance should be pretty much identical. Yet I've seen and experienced lots of issues with SF drives randomly disappearing on newer Intel chipsets like Z97.

While performance is almost identical, the price/performance ratio is obviously far from it.

Even if you didn't get the copy of Watch Dogs, the only major specification difference in the AMD drive vs the Kingston is the one extra year of warranty on the AMD drive. With the vast majority of people who're using SSD's, a 3 year upgrade cycle is average at best or even slow to some people.

But, you do get a copy of Watch Dogs with the Kingston which cannot be overlooked. It currently retails for $60 on Steam so that theoretically makes the HyperX SSD only $85. If you were to order 2, sell one copy of Watch Dogs and then RAID the SSD's, you'd get far better performance than the single R7 branded drive with around the same outlay of money... plus a free game lol


This AMD drive only has the one extra year of warrenty going for it... just not enough 'ooomph' for the price tag.

 

[newtekie1]

I hope the street price is a lot lower than the MSRP. Having a high MSRP and then having a much lower street price seems to be the trend in SSDs, I guess so the retailers can show massive mark downs. Like that HyperX drive has an MSRP of $210.

But the real thing I've learned, after reading so many different reviews and testing so many SSDs myself, is that real world performance of SSDs varies very little. Sure, there are measurable difference if you are benchmarking, but in real world use for the average consumer there is pretty much no difference.

 

[R0H1T]

While performance is almost identical, the price/performance ratio is obviously far from it.

Even if you didn't get the copy of Watch Dogs, the only major specification difference in the AMD drive vs the Kingston is the one extra year of warranty on the AMD drive. With the vast majority of people who're using SSD's, a 3 year upgrade cycle is average at best or even slow to some people.

But, you do get a copy of Watch Dogs with the Kingston which cannot be overlooked. It currently retails for $60 on Steam so that theoretically makes the HyperX SSD only $85. If you were to order 2, sell one copy of Watch Dogs and then RAID the SSD's, you'd get far better performance than the single R7 branded drive with around the same outlay of money... plus a free game lol


This AMD drive only has the one extra year of warrenty going for it... just not enough 'ooomph' for the price tag.

I'd say that's inaccurate especially if you look at some of the other benchmarks published on the web, also this drive has better endurance & a slightly long(er) term warranty which certainly makes it worth that few extra bucks IMO

 

[arnoo1]

i dont get this, toshibabought ocz and now amd got it? dafuq? and it's expensive because the Indilinx controller is expensive

 

[FreedomEclipse]

Basicly... An OCZ rebrand which is rebranded Toshiba SSD

 

[ocztony]

Basicly... An OCZ rebrand which is rebranded Toshiba SSD

Hi...Tony from ocz here , just thought i would clarify the drive is not a rebranded Toshiba drive, it uses Toshiba a19 Nand and our Indilinx designed controller...and the drive was designed by OCZ.

OCZ while owned by Tohsiba is a separate entity, working to design its own products and has its own client list...however some close cooperation with Toshiba is inevitable..but in this case this was our own work.

OCZ is a very different company to what you guys remember from a few years ago, some of the old staff remain (like me) but the core are all seriously specialised nand storage experts...its exciting times for sure

 

[Steevo]

I might suggest verifying that info with W1zzard before posting, unless you have already done so. Lest the ban hammer be mighty and swift upon you.


Kinda disappointed, this would be better run in the OEM channels, and unless they have something to compete with a 840 Evo.... not going to happen

 

[AndreiD]

Seems like an interesting SSD but the price and the fact that it's just a re-branded OCZ drive (not the best reliability track record for them) will make me stay away.
I have a 2 year old Plextor drive and it's still chugging along great, speeds are the same as when it was new, while my friends had issues with their OCZ drives :/
Maybe since Toshiba bought them, they changed, but it's probably going to take another year until all that bad image will wash away.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

Hi...Tony from ocz here , just thought i would clarify the drive is not a rebranded Toshiba drive, it uses Toshiba a19 Nand and our Indilinx designed controller...and the drive was designed by OCZ.

OCZ while owned by Tohsiba is a separate entity, working to design its own products and has its own client list...however some close cooperation with Toshiba is inevitable..but in this case this was our own work.

OCZ is a very different company to what you guys remember from a few years ago, some of the old staff remain (like me) but the core are all seriously specialised nand storage experts...its exciting times for sure

I hope your new SSDs will be more reliable then the ones you were making/selling prior to buyout by Toshiba. From what i hear, shit went south and there was nobody from OCZ left in forums to help the people who had issues after buying your products. Its understandable that you ignored repeated requests for help while you werent so sure about the companies future. Id be scared too but the news of you guys going under was a rumour at first that you quickly denied then admitted not long afterwards. You could of at least been more upfront and honest with your customers. Not that it means anything now anyway since whatever warranty with older OCZ products is void.

It will take you a long time to regain your reputation as a reliable brand after the Petrol & Octane SSD product lines.


I certainly wont be buying any OCZ SSDs any time soon.

 

[Sasqui]

I hope this thread doesn't become completely derailed.

My first thought in seeing an AMD SSD is they're looking for horizontal markets like Intel has done. Appears the product doesn't suck, and good for AMD to try new product avenues. I hope they succeed.

 

[Prima.Vera]

Difference is, Intel makes its own SSD drives, AMD rebrands....

 

[AndreiD]

Difference is, Intel makes its own SSD drives, AMD rebrands....

"Intel"'s new SSD, the Pro 2500 has a SandForce controller and SK Hynix NAND.
Spoiler: It is pretty awful performance and price wise.

 

[ocztony]

I hope your new SSDs will be more reliable then the ones you were making/selling prior to buyout by Toshiba. From what i hear, shit went south and there was nobody from OCZ left in forums to help the people who had issues after buying your products. Its understandable that you ignored repeated requests for help while you werent so sure about the companies future. Id be scared too but the news of you guys going under was a rumour at first that you quickly denied then admitted not long afterwards. You could of at least been more upfront and honest with your customers. Not that it means anything now anyway since whatever warranty with older OCZ products is void.

It will take you a long time to regain your reputation as a reliable brand after the Petrol & Octane SSD product lines.


I certainly wont be buying any OCZ SSDs any time soon.

Let me try and answer your concerns.

I hope your new SSDs will be more reliable then the ones you were making/selling prior to buyout by Toshiba. From what i hear, shit went south and there was nobody from OCZ left in forums to help the people who had issues after buying your products

well the forum team was totally unaffected, so i have no idea where you heard that, i think you really just needed to come over to the forum and see who was posting etc. Now we have opened a new forum and the old one is now gone, this is due to 90% of those products not being available any more and most were ocz technology products which is no longer trading...OCZ while keeping the main branding has transitioned into a new company.
Regards us making better products, moving to Toshiba is a major win for OCZ, we now have direct access to Nand flash, without having to fight for it, prior to Toshiba we had deals with many suppliers, while we did see nand we were being squeezed somewhat, all suppliers of Nand want to become SSD suppliers also, so why sell Nand to a competitor!

Also all the controllers have taken time to evolve, its taken 5 years to get the controllers to where we feel they are now of a technological standard to full fill the needs that SSD drives demand, so i don't think we supplied inferior products, i just feel the technology was in its infancy and now is way more mature.

Id be scared too but the news of you guys going under was a rumour at first that you quickly denied then admitted not long afterwards. You could of at least been more upfront and honest with your customers

we didn't actually go under, the terms of the takeover dictated what happened and yes i appreciate many would be concerned at what was being reported, Toshiba and OCZ were keen to uphold as many warranty claims as possible but there has to be a limit, so a balance had to be met...i think we did ok with some old drives still being supported...but obviously some are not.

It will take you a long time to regain your reputation as a reliable brand after the Petrol & Octane SSD product lines

well we do not offer those drives any more, regards reputation we do have work to do BUT we don't just sell end user drives any more...our enterprise side is doing quite well now which is allowing us to bring some focus back to the end user segment and offer drives we feel offer good value and the performance and the reliability end users want.

I certainly wont be buying any OCZ SSDs any time soon

well thats a strong opinion, however you would do better to say you will not be buying an ocztechnolgy drive any time soon I don't work for ocz technology, i work for ocz storage solutions which is part of the Toshiba group of companies and things are very very different now...way better for our customers.

You need to see past what you think you know and see a new company pushing forward...lots has changed.

http://oczforum.com/ is the home to our new forum, the old one was switched off 1 month after we launched the new one.

we also have a support site just about to launch for the Radeon R7 line of SSD's, when its live I will drop by with a link for this too, so any customers who have questions will know where to come and ask them

 

[Steevo]

I still have love for my Agility drive, once past the SF created issues it (once they) have been flawless.


I would buy OCZ again, but you need to have something to compete with the 840 Evo's man, I have used them and the pro series and other than the lack of anything useful from Samsung they have been as good. The average consumer buys on price per feature(s), so either more storage, or more speed. The warranty issues and damage done to the OCZ brand will have to be overcome with time and a lot of good PR. You being here is a good start there.

 

[ocztony]

I have been here for ages, my old login is bigtoe, i just lost my password and decided it was time for a more official looking name.

Sammys drives ...well i cant comment, i just know we are working to compete and offer good value.

warranty issues...i don't see any issues as such, yes some warranty went away when the company transitioned but we did our best to cover the most recent drives, not sure what else we could have done....try to look at it from a business point of view as well as an end users point of view...we tried to hit a balance between the 2

Personally i have over 120k posts on many forums over the past 16+ years working within this industry...i have seen a lot of companies come and go, i saw ocz grow then struggle and now grow again...difference is now we learnt from previous mistakes and have a much better infrastructure in place as I outlined with the nand situation etc.

Now i just need you guys to see past the negativity you look to have to ocz technology and have an open mind and neutral opinion of ocz storage solutions...give us a chance to show we are very different now. Plus partnering with AMD has to be a positive for customers also, the Radeon drive has been planned for a long time, a lot of effort has gone into the drive

 

[FreedomEclipse]

over 120k posts on many forums over the past 16+ years working within this industry...i have seen a lot of companies come and go, i saw ocz grow then struggle and now grow again...difference is now we learnt from previous mistakes and have a much better infrastructure in place as I outlined with the nand situation etc.

will you ever make ram again?

 

[Steevo]

warranty issues...i don't see any issues as such, yes some warranty went away when the company transitioned but we did our best to cover the most recent drives, not sure what else we could have done....try to look at it from a business point of view as well as an end users point of view...we tried to hit a balance between the 2

That is just it, the consumer doesn't care about your company, just like the company doesn't care about the consumer. http://www.forbes.com/profile/ralph-schmitt/ I am sure he felt so bad about some customers getting shafted he took some of his million dollars from 2012 he earned to fix their issues since he was in charge....right, since he and OCZ care so much.

 

[ocztony]

well im not going to win you over, so im not even going to try. I just feel we did the right thing supporting as many of the old OCZ Technology drives as we did, ultimately we could have started fresh, but we decided we would do the best we could with the resources available.

Take my opinion how you want....

 

[ocztony]

will you ever make ram again?

I very much doubt it, I actually looked at competitors pricing on ram kits around 3 yrs ago and most were selling ram at a loss on some kits, break even on a few and make excessive profit on others...the fast and popular sellers however made very little if any money....we would need to fab the dram and have huge supply to compete now, to many players in the game.

I still have over 100GB of ddr2 and around 50GB of DDR3 and 20GB of DDR1, way more than I will ever use...some of it is super special, the ultimate in cherry kits , some are development kits where we were searching for specific characteristics and some has very special pcb to allow specific use on select motherboards

 

[alwayssts]

I very much doubt it, I actually looked at competitors pricing on ram kits around 3 yrs ago and most were selling ram at a loss on some kits, break even on a few and make excessive profit on others...the fast and popular sellers however made very little if any money....we would need to fab the dram and have huge supply to compete now, to many players in the game.

I still have over 100GB of ddr2 and around 50GB of DDR3 and 20GB of DDR1, way more than I will ever use...some of it is super special, the ultimate in cherry kits , some are development kits where we were searching for specific characteristics and some has very special pcb to allow specific use on select motherboards

Jeez...I can't believe you aren't getting any respect around here, Tony. People these days seem to have no respect for (or forgotten) the OG OCers that built the scene back in it's heyday, which is a shame. Some of us haven't, fwiw.

I remember you quite well from the fantastic years (may they long be remembered) over at XS and elsewhere. Glad you're still around, active on TPU, answering questions, and maintaining your patience.

 

[ocztony]

Its ok m8, im thick skinned, the new guys have no idea what they have now was due to the work we did a ways back, i remember helping design 939 boards for DFI and AMD and working to improve ram and memory controller overclocking.

I even have a joint patent with TPU guru w1zzard...

 

[alwayssts]

Its ok m8, im thick skinned, the new guys have no idea what they have now was due to the work we did a ways back, i remember helping design 939 boards for DFI and AMD and working to improve ram and memory controller overclocking.

I even have a joint patent with TPU guru w1zzard...

Oh, I remember. I had those boards, and both bh-5 (amd + winbond...those were the days) and tccd from OCZ. I remember tuning pots, mem settings, memtest...even the 5v rail to the ram...all the good stuff that really made this hobby fun.

Man, I miss it (Oskar Wu, yourself, and others engineering and discovering interesting stuff). I wish things weren't so locked-down, binned, and automatic these days, but realize you pushed the scene forward so we could get there (to that inevitable conclusion of highly binned chips for specific purposes; motherboard features that adjust timings/voltages...which over-all I suppose is best for the average consumer).

Even so, I hope if anyone didn't know...they do now. Respect this guy, he was a pioneer/helper in establishing many of the things 'overclockers' take for granted these days.