OCZ RevoDrive 120GB review

Posted by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 08/31/2010 01:00 PM [ 0 comment(s) ]

SSD Performance HD Tach 3.0.4.0

HD Tach

HD Tach is a physical performance hard drive test that uses a special kernel mode VXD to get maximum accuracy by bypassing the file system.

The HD Tach sequential read test is a little bit different from other benchmarks. Most benchmarks create a file on the hard drive and test within that file. The problem is that modern hard drives use a zone bit recording technique that allows different read speeds depending on where the data is located. Data on the outside of the drive is much faster than data recorded on the inside.

With this test we NEVER reach advertised speeds, so please don't worry about that. It is the nature of the test. That said, HD-Tach does not respond well to the RAID0 setup as you can see.

When we look at write performance we see slightly slower scaling, we still get 205 MB/sec in this test, and that's okay for this drive. But not what we'd expect.

In addition to sequential read performance, HD Tach tests the drive's random access time. Random access is the true measure of seek speed. Many drives advertise sub 10 millisecond seek speeds, but seek speeds are misleading. Also again, without a physical head that needs moving around, the SSDs are just so fast as they have no mechanical moving parts. Here obviously ... the smaller number is better, 0.1 ms.

As you can see, read write performance in not at all constant, while it should be. We can't explain it really (click to enlarge screenshot btw).

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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

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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.

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