Today we have in our labs a solid-state drive (SSD) designed by OCZ and branded by AMD. The AMD Radeon R7 SSD has been available at the market for a long time now, and it is AMD's first effort to expand its successful Radeon brand to SSDs.

Just as they did with memory, AMD is partnering with a third party that handles the development, manufacturing and support of the product, which in the case of the R7 SSD is OCZ.

The SSD is listed on both AMD's and OCZ's websites. It is based on OCZ's Barefoot 3 platform as many other SSDs, so we should not expect anything new or rather surprising from this product.

The R7 SSD is based on OCZ's Barefoot 3 M00 controller, which is clocked at 397MHz. We should mention that the M10 version of the controller that is used in the ARC 100 and Vertex 460/450 runs at 352MHz instead. The NAND is the same Toshiba's 64Gbit A19nm MLC as in the ARC 100. But there is also a change. While the ARC 100 is rated at 20GB for three years (21.9TB total) and the Vector 150 is at 50GB for five years (91.2TB total), the R7 hits the middle ground by offering 30GB of writes per day for four years (43.8TB total).

The R7 SSD is available in capacities of 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB.

Here are the specs:

1. Maximum sequential speeds are determined using ATTO
2. 4KB random performance is measured with IOMeter 2010, incompressible, QD32
3. Steady State performance measured with IOMeter 2010 after a 12hr precondition according to SNIA guidelines