AMD Enters SSD Market in Partnership with OCZ

After making CPUs and GPUs for a long time, AMD also entered the memory market with its Radeon Memory back in 2011. Now, the company is invading the storage market with a line of Radeon-branded SSDs. The new Radeon R7 series SSDs are built by OCZ and are made with Toshiba-built MLC NAND flash.

Also, rather than making the Radeon R7 SSDs a whole new product line, AMD has positioned the SSDs to fit in the OCZ product stack. The Vector 150 Series SSDs are workstation drives for professionals, the Radeon R7 series SSDs are for gamers and the Vertex 460 series are aimed at mainstre users.

The Controller aboard the Radeon R7 SSDs is a Barefoot 3 M00 controller, which in conjunction with the 19 nm Toshiba MLC flash will let it read at speeds of up to 550 MB/s and write at up to 530 MB/s. Endurance of the SSDs is rated at 30 GB per day written.

Capacities will initially range from 120 GB to 480 GB, with the 120 GB model priced at $99.99 MSRP.

It's worth noting that this SSD is not only Rade-branded, but also specifically R7. This leads us to believe that there might be an R9 series SSD in the works, or at least on the agenda.

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Niels Broekhuijsen

Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

  • red77star
    Wow that is weird. Looks like AMD might be selling their own computers since they make everything to put together such. CPU, motherboard, GPU, Memory, SSD.
    Reply
  • TechyInAZ
    Interesting, are they doing this because they are loosing the CPU battle?
    Reply
  • redgarl
    Simply... why, sometime I am asking myself the question. I love AMD but there is no gain of putting an AMD sticker on OEMs.
    Reply
  • Gam3r01
    Though I'm not crazy about the logo slapped into the middle, it would likely be hidden in a drive bay anyway, I do like the overall pattern on it.
    Honestly dont know too much about SSDs, do I dont know how quality the drive itself is, like the looks though.
    Reply
  • Shneiky
    I feel so bad about the ATI guys. Back in the old days, Radeon was a name to be proud of. Radeon RAM, Radeon SSD, what is next? Radeon "Gaming" snacks and "Radeon Peanuts - Gamer's performance edition"....
    Reply
  • Gam3r01
    13993468 said:
    I feel so bad about the ATI guys. Back in the old days, Radeon was a name to be proud of. Radeon RAM, Radeon SSD, what is next? Radeon "Gaming" snacks and "Radeon Peanuts - Gamer's performance edition"....

    If the snacks are cheap I would buy them...
    In all honesty though I agree with you, though I would like cheap food.
    Reply
  • Darth_Kaar
    I like the idea that AMD is trying to diversify its offer. Especially with good quality designs.
    Reply
  • Junit151
    If it looks like that render (probz won't) I will pick two up to go in the bottom SSD mounts of my black/red H440. Color schemes FTW.
    Reply
  • dovah-chan
    I saw this on newegg just seconds eariler and soon as I came to toms I'm like wow I didn't notice that on the front page earlier :o
    Reply
  • The_Icon
    Interesting, are they doing this because they are loosing the CPU battle?

    Maybe they just want to diversify? Even though I use core i5 myself, I saw my friend's AMD CPU built computer and it is no slouch and didn't cost as much as mine did.
    Reply