AMD Radeon R7 SSD (240GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on August 28, 2014 6:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench 2013
Our Storage Bench 2013 focuses on worst-case multitasking and IO consistency. Similar to our earlier Storage Benches, the test is still application trace based – we record all IO requests made to a test system and play them back on the drive we are testing and run statistical analysis on the drive's responses. There are 49.8 million IO operations in total with 1583.0GB of reads and 875.6GB of writes. I'm not including the full description of the test for better readability, so make sure to read our Storage Bench 2013 introduction for the full details.
| AnandTech Storage Bench 2013 - The Destroyer | ||
| Workload | Description | Applications Used |
| Photo Sync/Editing | Import images, edit, export | Adobe Photoshop CS6, Adobe Lightroom 4, Dropbox |
| Gaming | Download/install games, play games | Steam, Deus Ex, Skyrim, Starcraft 2, BioShock Infinite |
| Virtualization | Run/manage VM, use general apps inside VM | VirtualBox |
| General Productivity | Browse the web, manage local email, copy files, encrypt/decrypt files, backup system, download content, virus/malware scan | Chrome, IE10, Outlook, Windows 8, AxCrypt, uTorrent, AdAware |
| Video Playback | Copy and watch movies | Windows 8 |
| Application Development | Compile projects, check out code, download code samples | Visual Studio 2012 |
We are reporting two primary metrics with the Destroyer: average data rate in MB/s and average service time in microseconds. The former gives you an idea of the throughput of the drive during the time that it was running the test workload. This can be a very good indication of overall performance. What average data rate doesn't do a good job of is taking into account response time of very bursty (read: high queue depth) IO. By reporting average service time we heavily weigh latency for queued IOs. You'll note that this is a metric we have been reporting in our enterprise benchmarks for a while now. With the client tests maturing, the time was right for a little convergence.
Performance in our 2013 Storage Bench is typical Barefoot 3, although it appears that both the R7 and ARC 100 are more optimized for small IOs given that they provide a lower service time, yet the data rate is marginally slower.
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blackmagnum - Thursday, August 28, 2014 - link
AMD and her antics of renaming/ re-branding a product once again. Everything's as usual, enthusiasts please move along (to someone else's).Wolfpup - Thursday, August 28, 2014 - link
I've got zero problem with this. If they're only dealing with quality products, I think it can be a boost to both companies images, and kind of an easy way for someone who wants quality components but doesn't want to think much about it to grab it and know they're getting something okay.I'd be MUCH more inclined to get OCZ now that it's owned by Toshiba, though Crucial and Intel remain my go-to brands (and I'd probably look at the hard drive companies seriously too).
kaesden - Thursday, August 28, 2014 - link
if they wanted to deal with quality products, OCZ would be near the very bottom of their list. They are apparently just going for dirt cheap, to hell with reliability. OCZ products fail like clockwork.PEJUman - Thursday, August 28, 2014 - link
Products fail like clockwork? How many ocz products have failed on you? I personally owns/owned 14 of their old time ddr2 sticks and 7 of their ssds, youngest one is 3 years old. Haven't failed one yet.willis936 - Thursday, August 28, 2014 - link
Their ssd track record early on (mind you early on means less than five years ago) was actually horrifying.patssle - Thursday, August 28, 2014 - link
What? Their early SSD drives (Vertex/Agility) changed everything - they were the first SSDs that worked well and were reliable. I know because I bought an SSD as soon as there was one on the market that didn't have the write delay issue. Their quality went down over time but early on OCZ was THE SSD company.Guspaz - Thursday, August 28, 2014 - link
It was the Vertex and Agility drives that *gave* them their terrible reputation. They were only "the" SSD company early on because they were cheap and nobody had realized WHY they were so cheap yet (because they sacrificed reliability for performance).Samus - Thursday, August 28, 2014 - link
Agility drives were terrible. OCZ knew it and quickly replaced the Agility line with Agility 2 (literally in a matter of months) and even fulfilled RMA's for Agility with Agility 2's (my personal experience) but I still have an Agility 2 240GB running for 3 years without issue. But this isn't the norm, most of these drives eventually just stop detecting in the BIOS. Some of their SSD failures I've attributed to "freakout" when they are too full - a typical Sandforce problem when there is not enough space to do garbage collection.But its pretty obvious, even for Sandforce-based drives, OCZ SSD's were the most unreliable out there, probably due to low-quality NAND, poor or over-aggressive firmware tuning, or just bad design.
I'm glad Toshiba bailed them out because I am a huge Barefoot fan. The controller is just incredibly consistent.
ummduh - Friday, August 29, 2014 - link
Yup. My first Agility lasted about 3 months. The second another 6 months. The third I've had for a long time now (in ocz SSD terms) but that's only because it sits all by itself as a "install whatever OS you want to play around with this time for a week or so until you get bored and leave it for another 6 months" drive.bronan - Monday, November 9, 2015 - link
Well i know they made at one time a serie of bad drives, but i NEVER had any issues ever.OCZ ssd's still am pretty good drives, but the ever lasting whining from people about that flawed series keeps coming up. All my ocz vertex drives still going strong and my vertex 2 runs like it is brand new. So stop the whining and focus on the products they make now. I do not see you people whine about intels massive mistakes do you, or the fails of others brands.