OCZ RevoDrive 120GB review - Introduction

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 08/31/2010 02:00 PM [ ] 0 comment(s)

OCZ RevoDrive 120 GB

The OCZ RevoDrive - Revolutionary ?

The SSD market has been explosively expanding ever since the past year or two. New technologies, new features and high capacity drives are key features in the evolving trend.

Anno 2010 we have however reached a bit of a bottleneck, fact is that while SATA 6G has been launched, the adoption rate is going slow. And that's next to the fact that all SSDs are still equipped with the lazy ass SATA 2 3G connector. Peak performance of the SSDs however is roughly the maximum of SATA 2, and as such we reach the upper limit in terms of speed and performance with the current NAND FLASH based SSD drives.

Sure in the future the SSD drives will become even faster with higher channel controller configurations and faster NAND flash, but meanwhile for the real freaks there are options. If 270 MB/sec is just not fast enough for you, then you can setup say two SSDs in RAID0, and nearly double up performance. Not a lot of people like that though, as RAID still is a dirty word somehow.

So the next best thing to lookout are PCIe based storage cards with NAND Flash memory. Pretty much two SSDs slapped onto a PCB, armed with a RAID controller. Pop it in, install the new storage unit and you'll have tremendous performance right off the shelves without the need to configure anything.

OCZ picked up on that idea, they just released the RevoDrive, targeted at a consumer price level point that is equal and soon hopefully cheaper than two SSDs, but offers that same level of performance over your PCIe bus.

It's the proverbial hot shit my man ... As what OCZ did was done right. They smacked 120GB or alternatively 240 GB of the fastest NAND Flash memory on the PCB, armed that Flash memory with two separate 8-channel SandForce SSD ICs, then bind them to a SIS RAID controller, pop on a PCie x4 bridge and then offer a "PCIe SSD" (if you can call it that) reaching 300, 400 even 500 MB/sec read and write speeds.

I caught your attention didn't I ? Next page please where we'll startup the review.

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OCZ RevoDrive 350 PCIe SSD Review
We'll be testing the RevoDrive 350 from OCZ Storage Solutions today. Let me just quickly throw some numbers at you that will get a smile on your face, so how do 1700~1800 MB/s maximum read and write ...

OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid review
We review the RevoDrive Hybrid. The idea behind the device hints very much towards Intel's Rapid Storage technology where a HDD is being cached by a Nand flash storage unit. Being OCZ they are making it an enthusiast class performance product. The product we test today for example comes with a 1TB HDD, and a really large 100GB cache partition running over SF2281 controllers. OCZ then applies a mix of their VCA 2.0 technology

OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 review
We'll be testing an engineering sample of that RevoDrive 3 X2 today. Let me just throw some numbers at you to get that tickly in your belly ; 1500 MB/s maximum read performance, or what about 1250 MB/s maximum write performance ? No that still didn't do it for you ... well what about 200.000 IOPS (4K writes) ? Yeah that is where we have arrived in the year 2011. It's insanely fast, it will be insanely expensive but it is most definitely insanely sexy.

OCZ RevoDrive X2 240GB review
We test the OCZ Revodrive X2, a concept that is close to that IBIS product, but also is not. Will this RAID based SSD solution be faster, slower or equal in performance relative to that IBIS ? Fact remains, today we'll pass 700 MB/sec of storage performance from something slapped onto a PCIe 4x slots and that is just frightening to test, that fast.