AMD is bringing the popular Radeon brand to solid-state drives, with the new Radeon R7 SSD series the include Toshiba/OCZ memory and be essentially a mid-range OCZ SSD with an AMD sticker on it. Similar to AMD Radeon memory, AMD is not actually designing or manufacturing the SSDs as the product design and manufacturing is handled by OCZ. In fact, all the customer support is also handled by OCZ.

The new SSDs are based on OCZ's Barefoot 3 platform and has the same higher clocked M00 version (397MHz) as in the Vector 150. The new OCZ ARC 100 and Vertex 460 use the M10 version, which runs at 352MHz instead of 397MHz but is otherwise the same silicon. Performance wise the R7 SSD is very close to Vector 150 with slightly lower random write performance, although random read performance is marginally better in turn.

The biggest difference between the two is endurance as the Vector 150 is rated at 50GB per day for five years (91TB total) while the R7 is rated at 30GB per day for four years (43TB total). The NAND is also different as the R7 utilizes Toshiba's A19nm MLC, but OCZ should be making the switch to A19nm across its whole client SSD lineup soon to cut costs.

AMD Radeon R7 Series SSD
Capacity	120GB	240GB	480GB
Controller	OCZ Barefoot 3 M00
NAND	Toshiba A19nm MLC
Sequential Read	550MB/s	550MB/s	550MB/s
Sequential Write	470MB/s	530MB/s	530MB/s
4KB Random Read	85K IOPS	95K IOPS	100K IOPS
4KB Random Write	90K IOPS	90K IOPS	90K IOPS
Steady-State 4KB Random Write	12K IOPS	20K IOPS	23K IOPS
Idle Power	0.6W	0.6W	0.6W
Max Power	2.7W	2.7W	2.7W
Encryption	AES-256
Endurance	30GB/day for 4 years
Warranty	Four years
MSRP	$100	$164	$299