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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blackmagnum - Thursday, August 28, 2014 - link
AMD and her antics of renaming/ re-branding a product once again. Everything's as usual, enthusiasts please move along (to someone else's).Wolfpup - Thursday, August 28, 2014 - link
I've got zero problem with this. If they're only dealing with quality products, I think it can be a boost to both companies images, and kind of an easy way for someone who wants quality components but doesn't want to think much about it to grab it and know they're getting something okay.I'd be MUCH more inclined to get OCZ now that it's owned by Toshiba, though Crucial and Intel remain my go-to brands (and I'd probably look at the hard drive companies seriously too).
kaesden - Thursday, August 28, 2014 - link
if they wanted to deal with quality products, OCZ would be near the very bottom of their list. They are apparently just going for dirt cheap, to hell with reliability. OCZ products fail like clockwork.PEJUman - Thursday, August 28, 2014 - link
Products fail like clockwork? How many ocz products have failed on you? I personally owns/owned 14 of their old time ddr2 sticks and 7 of their ssds, youngest one is 3 years old. Haven't failed one yet.willis936 - Thursday, August 28, 2014 - link
Their ssd track record early on (mind you early on means less than five years ago) was actually horrifying.patssle - Thursday, August 28, 2014 - link
What? Their early SSD drives (Vertex/Agility) changed everything - they were the first SSDs that worked well and were reliable. I know because I bought an SSD as soon as there was one on the market that didn't have the write delay issue. Their quality went down over time but early on OCZ was THE SSD company.Guspaz - Thursday, August 28, 2014 - link
It was the Vertex and Agility drives that *gave* them their terrible reputation. They were only "the" SSD company early on because they were cheap and nobody had realized WHY they were so cheap yet (because they sacrificed reliability for performance).Samus - Thursday, August 28, 2014 - link
Agility drives were terrible. OCZ knew it and quickly replaced the Agility line with Agility 2 (literally in a matter of months) and even fulfilled RMA's for Agility with Agility 2's (my personal experience) but I still have an Agility 2 240GB running for 3 years without issue. But this isn't the norm, most of these drives eventually just stop detecting in the BIOS. Some of their SSD failures I've attributed to "freakout" when they are too full - a typical Sandforce problem when there is not enough space to do garbage collection.But its pretty obvious, even for Sandforce-based drives, OCZ SSD's were the most unreliable out there, probably due to low-quality NAND, poor or over-aggressive firmware tuning, or just bad design.
I'm glad Toshiba bailed them out because I am a huge Barefoot fan. The controller is just incredibly consistent.
ummduh - Friday, August 29, 2014 - link
Yup. My first Agility lasted about 3 months. The second another 6 months. The third I've had for a long time now (in ocz SSD terms) but that's only because it sits all by itself as a "install whatever OS you want to play around with this time for a week or so until you get bored and leave it for another 6 months" drive.bronan - Monday, November 9, 2015 - link
Well i know they made at one time a serie of bad drives, but i NEVER had any issues ever.OCZ ssd's still am pretty good drives, but the ever lasting whining from people about that flawed series keeps coming up. All my ocz vertex drives still going strong and my vertex 2 runs like it is brand new. So stop the whining and focus on the products they make now. I do not see you people whine about intels massive mistakes do you, or the fails of others brands.