AMD Radeon R7 SSD (240GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on August 28, 2014 6:00 AM ESTRandom Read/Write Speed
The four corners of SSD performance are as follows: random read, random write, sequential read and sequential write speed. Random accesses are generally small in size, while sequential accesses tend to be larger and thus we have the four Iometer tests we use in all of our reviews.
Our first test writes 4KB in a completely random pattern over an 8GB space of the drive to simulate the sort of random access that you'd see on an OS drive (even this is more stressful than a normal desktop user would see). We perform three concurrent IOs and run the test for 3 minutes. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire time.
Random performance remains similar to other Barefoot 3 SSDs. Peak performance has never been Barefoot 3's strength, which is why especially random read performance seems slow for a modern drive, but the lack of peak performance is compensated by sustained consistency.
Sequential Read/Write Speed
To measure sequential performance we run a 1 minute long 128KB sequential test over the entire span of the drive at a queue depth of 1. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire test length.
Sequential read performance receives a nice upgrade from the Vector 150 and Vertex 460, although that comes at the cost of sequential write speed. It is quite common that an increasing in one benchmark leads to a decrese in another as in the end firmware design is about finding the right balance for IO priorization.
AS-SSD Incompressible Sequential Read/Write Performance
The AS-SSD sequential benchmark uses incompressible data for all of its transfers. The result is a pretty big reduction in sequential write speed on SandForce based controllers, but most other controllers are unaffected.
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Death666Angel - Friday, August 29, 2014 - link
Agility 1 and Vertex 2 still going strong here!mapesdhs - Saturday, August 30, 2014 - link
The key is fw updates. The old bugs are fixed. Once done, they're fine.People act like OCZ was the only company to have issues, but even Intel and
Samsung screwed up their SSD line at one point or other (FUD posters choose
to forget Intel's 8MB bricked SSD issue).
Ian.
bronan - Monday, November 9, 2015 - link
Agreed on that Death666Angel i got 12 of them all running perfect, ofcourse one day they will die :DBut this far super and still good performance for such OLD ssd ;)
On topic i like the way AMD is going open in everything no faking or hiding facts like the competition, i hope AMD keeps up the good work they are doing. Teaming up with other good brands like Toshiba and such only makes both brands better. A shame they do not have a enterprise version else i would have considered them as well
zero2dash - Thursday, August 28, 2014 - link
I'm sorry, did you just say Vertex/Agility were reliable? Is it opposite day or something?I owned a 30 GB Vertex. It was great for 10 months. Then it started throwing up chkdsk errors. Sanitary Erasing did nothing but "buy some time". I had it replaced several times under warranty. Then they put out a FW update that turned Vertex's into Vertex Pros (probably in an effort to look less terrible with mud on their faces). I flashed mine, sanitary erased it again, and sold it for peanuts (almost literally) and got a Crucial M4 SSD that has been rock solid for several years now.
As far as I'm concerned, OCZ can close their doors for good. Or don't, I could care less because I'm never purchasing another OCZ product ever again.
Homeles - Thursday, August 28, 2014 - link
Their Octane/Petrol failure rates were close to 50%.ProfSparkles - Friday, August 29, 2014 - link
At my company we go through many SSDs per year and by now we lost every single OCZ SSD (mostly Vertex 3) we bought so far and had to replace it, at first we use the warranty and replaced it with yet another OCZ but when those failed aswell we bought new Samsung SSDs (840 EVO) which was less expensive than driving to customers another time and replacing the failed drives. The Samsungs drives already tripled the OCZ drives lifetime.I personally own a first batch Vertex 2 which still works well but since the rev 2 of the Vertex 2 and Vertex 3 they went so far downhill its just ridiculous.
mapesdhs - Saturday, August 30, 2014 - link
Blah blah. Fact is, none of that applies to the non-Sandforce models, and I've had no
issues with the pile of V3 MXIs I bought; guess you were just unlucky.
Ian.
dragonsqrrl - Thursday, August 28, 2014 - link
... I think he's referring to their SSD's.Guspaz - Thursday, August 28, 2014 - link
Bought a bunch of OCZ RAM. It failed (or at least some sticks did) and they got out of the RAM business so they invalidated the warranty. Convinced a friend to buy a Vertex 2 before they got their bad rep. It failed. He got a replacement. It failed. He got a replacement. It failed. He bought an Intel. It didn't fail.Sorry, but a company with such unreliable products getting bought out by Toshiba (who lied to me and refused to honour their warranty) just makes them even more of a "not with a ten foot pole" in my books.
Sparrowgryphon - Monday, March 7, 2016 - link
I just had this SSD fail last night, it was about 4 months old. put it in a different PC will not show up and even stops the PC from booting.