AMD said Tuesday that it will sell three 2.5-inch SSDs manufactured by enthusiast house OCZ, allowing AMD to offer high-speed storage alongside microprocessors and graphics chips. AMD will sell the three SSDs as Radeon R7 SSDs, tying them to its Radeon family of GPUs. OCZ, which was recently acquired by Toshiba, will actually make the drives, together with its own flash chips and controllers. Right now, AMD’s new drives sit among the cream of the enthusiast SSD crop, with sequential read speeds of 545MB/sec and write speeds of 530 MB/sec.
PC builders mostly think of CPUs and GPUs when they think of AMD, but today the company announced that it’s getting into the SSD business. AMD will be partnering with Toshiba-owned OCZ to launch three Radeon R7-branded solid-state drives in 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB capacities. The drives use OCZ’s Barefoot 3 controller and Toshiba’s A19nm NAND chips, have four-year warranties, and include 3.5-inch drive adapters for desktops and disk cloning software from Acronis to aid with data migration. Additional information and specifications are laid out in the slides below. The drives start at $99 for the 120GB model, well south of the $1-per-GB line, and the competitive SSD landscape usually pushes prices down a bit from the MSRP (the 240GB and 480GB models go for $164 and $299, respectively). However, AMD’s drives will face strong competition from other entrenched competitors. Looking at Amazon shows well-regarded Samsung drives below that price point ($89 for a 120GB Samsung 840 EVO), and prices of older drives from value players like Kingston go even lower ($55 for a 120GB SSDNow V300 drive, $95 for a 240GB model).