AMD plans Radeon R7 solid-state drives

In the past decade AMD has greatly expanded its business. A long time ago the US chip maker was making and selling processors only but in 2006 the company began selling graphics processing units, which were then followed by accelerated processing units (APUs) and computer memory. Now AMD will also sell solid-state drives under the brand name Radeon R7.

Although this brand name coincides with certain AMD graphics solutions, the Radeon R7 drives will be 100 per cent SSDs. They will appear in three capacities as of now – 120 GB, 240 GB and 480 GB with all of them based on the OCZ Barefoot 3 M00 controller. The memory used will be Toshiba MLC NAND on 19 nm tech process.

Users of OCZ SSDs will perhaps easily find out that the upcoming AMD Radeon R7 SSDs strongly resemble the OCZ Vector 150 solid-state drives and in fact this is the case – the R7 solid-state drives are based on these OCZ models. Here’s some data on their performance – the 120 GB model will reach 550 MB/sec of read speed and 470 MB/sec of write speed; the 240 GB model offers 550 MB/sec of read speed and 530 MB/sec of write speed; the 480 GB models is just as fast. As to IOPS, here’s how things look like – 120 GB model (85 000/90 000 IOPS read/write), 240 GB model (95 000/90 000 IOPS read/write), 480 GB model (100 000/90 000 IOPS read/write). All drives come in the popular 2.5-inch form factor and are just 7 mm thick.

There’s no word on the official release date or pricing as of now, though.

Source: AMD