AMD teams up with OCZ to launch its first SSDs, the Radeon R7 series

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For the past few years, AMD has been exploring products outside its usual CPU/APU/GPU divisions. Part of that process has been the company’s move into its own server hardware with SeaMicro, its semi-custom wins with the Xbox One and PS4, and the growth of its semicustom business as a whole. At the same time, however, AMD has pushed into the consumer component space with Radeon-branded memory — and now, with Radeon-branded SSDs.
As with its memory offerings, AMD isn’t fabbing its own equipment — its paying other companies for specific SKUs and products that it then rebrands as its own. In this case, AMD is partnering up with OCZ to launch a new set of SSDs in the consumer market.
OCZ’s own history with SSDs has run the product gamut. In the beginning, the company was an early enthusiast leader; its Vertex and Vertex 2 families broke speed records and were quite affordable (by the standards of the day). OCZ was bitten badly by the early firmware bugs that struck the SandForce family and the company’s follow-up drives had issues of their own. Now, AMD and OCZ are teaming up to offer a product they feel combine the best of both manufacturers.

The new AMD Radeon-branded SSDs will be the first drives to use Toshiba’s new A19nm NAND. It’s not entirely clear how this differs from previous NAND generations, but we’re betting that Toshiba has continued iterating on its previous process to product an incrementally better product). AMD is claiming that the drives use a specialized firmware variant and an overclocked firmware, but we expect that the differences, again, are fairly modest. AMD is staking its claim on reliability and durability more than raw performance with a longer warranty and higher write period (30GB per day, up from 20GB on a standard drive).

We’re going to have performance tests in the near future, but the bigger picture isn’t about the drive’s standout performance. The focus here is on the total package AMD is putting together and the way it hopes to create a marketing position as a late entrant. The drives should be decent performers with good characteristics and reliability — AMD has emphasized to us that it waited specifically for the A19nm NAND to be ready for certain metrics before it went ahead with the launch.
The company is targeting aggressive price points — $99 for a 120GB drive, $164 for a 256GB drive, and $290 for a 480GB drive. That’s good, but it’ll have a hard time competing with the Samsung 840 EVO, which hits $250 for a 500GB drive. Here, AMD is hoping that longer warranty terms and a higher endurance (in terms of GB/day) will win over customers. It may have a point — while we love the EVO as a consumer drive, customers who prioritize reliability above all else may still want to steer clear of TLC NAND in general.