Shootouts

AMD Radeon R7 vs. Plextor M6 Pro - Two high-end SSDs challenge for honors

By Kenny Yeo - 12 Sep 2014

Introduction

High-end tussle

The good news for consumers right now is that prices of SSDs have never been lower. In the past, a good high-end SSD at the 240/256GB capacity point would set you back around S$300 or even more. Now, prices of such drives have dropped to around S$220 to SS$250. If you are not fussy about performance, entry-level or mainstream drives at this capacity point can be had for even lower, at around S$160 to S$180. So really, at the minimum, there’s no reason for anyone to still be using a spinning hard disk drive as their bootup drive.

Consumers are truly spoiled for choice right now with so many competent SSDs in the market. Today, we pit two of the newest high-end SSDs against each other - the AMD R7 and the Plextor M6 Pro.

 

Introducing the Radeon R7

One of the reasons why prices have come down so quickly is because of increased competition. Although the market is showing signs of consolidation, competition from the main players - Samsung, Crucial/Micron, SanDisk, and now OCZ/Toshiba - has been intensifying. Obviously, this is good news for all consumers and we are certainly not complaining.

The newest player to this market is AMD. Since April this year, there were rumors that AMD was going to partner Toshiba to produce SSDs. And this was finally confirmed last month when AMD announced its new R7 SSDs, which are indeed produced in collaboration with OCZ/Toshiba.

The move marked AMD’s continual efforts to make it easier for consumers to assemble AMD-powered systems. Apart from its processors, APUs and graphics cards, in 2011, AMD also announced its own Radeon-branded memory modules. With the introduction of the R7, AMD Radeon now covers processors, APUs, memory, graphics and storage, making it easy for novices to pick and build their own systems.

As mentioned in our news piece, the AMD Radeon R7 SSD will be an exclusive partnership with OCZ/Toshiba. The partnership makes sense because along with Samsung, Crucial/Micron and SanDisk, OCZ/Toshiba is one of the few SSD manufacturers to have access to its own NAND. This is a crucial aspect to staying competitive in the SSD business.

This is how the AMD R7 will fit into OCZ's line-up.

As for the Radeon R7, the drive actually slots in perfectly between OCZ’s existing Vertex 460 and Vector 150 drives, which makes it a mid to high-end SSD. AMD mentions that it will be targeted squarely at gamers and it will use OCZ’s own in-house developed Barefoot 3 controller. It will also be the first high-end SSD to utilize Toshiba’s new A19nm MLC NAND.

Flip the AMD drive around and you will see OCZ labels all over.

If you have handled OCZ drives in the past, the feel of the R7 will be instantly familiar. The chassis has the same solid and hefty feel of OCZ drives. In fact, AMD makes no bones about their collaboration with OCZ/Toshiba, because if you turn the drive around, you will see labels by OCZ. The Radeon R7 will also be packaged similar to OCZ drives and will come with a 3.5-inch hard disk bay adapter and Acronis TrueImage cloning utility.

 

Plextor M6 Pro

One the left, the older Plextor M5 Pro Xtreme; on the right, the newer Plextor M6 Pro. The rose gold-colored chassis is unusual and quite funky looking in our books.

Earlier in May, we reviewed the first drive from Plextor’s new M6 series - the entry-level M6S - and found it to be an attractive option for mainstream users and bargain hunters. It offered decent performance and a long five-year warranty, and prices have been steadily declining since then, making it even more attractive today.

However, this also led us to wonder when will Plextor be dropping its flagship M6 Pro drive. Our answers were answered a month later at Computex 2014, when it unveiled its M6 Pro drive.

The new Plextor M6 Pro uses the tried-and-test Marvell 88SS9187 controller that is used in other high-end drives such as the SanDisk Extreme II and the drive it replaces, the Plextor M5 Pro Xtreme. It also uses the same new Toshiba A19nm MLC NAND as the AMD R7. Interestingly, it looks almost identical to the M5 Pro Xtreme, save for its funky rose gold-colored chassis.

But controller and memory aside, what is arguably most interesting about the Plextor M6 Pro is its new PlexTurbo caching technology. Like Samsung’s RAPID Mode caching technology, PlexTurbo will make use of system memory and the SSD’s DRAM to boost speeds and offer levels of performance that will rival PCIe-based SSD drives. The technology looks promising and demo systems at Computex 2014 showed the new M6 Pro with PlexTurbo enabled hitting sequential read and write speeds that were far in excess of 2GB/s and random read and write speeds that were nearly 1GB/s.

 

Test Setup

The two SSDs will be tested on our dedicated storage testbed:

  • Intel Core i5-2500K (3.3GHz)
  • ASUS P8Z77 Pro Thunderbolt (Intel Z77 chipset)
  • 2 x 2GB DDR3-1600 memory
  • MSI GeForce 8600 GTS
  • Windows 7

We have recently revised our benchmarks, ditching older benchmarks such as HD Tune and also including an all new timing test to better evaluate the drive’s real world performance. The list of benchmarks used are as follows:

  • AS-SSD benchmark 1.7.4739
  • CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1
  • PCMark 7 (Storage suite)
  • Iometer (version 2006.07.27)
  • Timing Tests (Cold start, Reboot, Apps Launching)

We will be pitting the new AMD Radeon R7 and Plextor M6 Pro against some of the quickest drives in the business. For the R7, it will be interesting to see how it matches up against the Vertex 460 and the flagship Vector 150. As for the Plextor M6 Pro, it will be intriguing to see how much Plextor can improve it over the M5 Pro Xtreme, which is still among one of the fastest SSDs in the market today. The M6 Pro will be tested as is without enabling PlexTurbo, which we will look into in a separate article in the future.

Here is the list of drives tested:

  • AMD Radeon R7
  • Plextor M6 Pro
  • OCZ Vertex 460
  • OCZ Vector 150
  • Plextor M5 Pro Xtreme
  • Samsung SSD 850 Pro
  • Samsung SSD 840 Pro
Join HWZ's Telegram channel here and catch all the latest tech news!
Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.