OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid review

Memory (DDR4/DDR5) and Storage (SSD/NVMe) 367 Page 3 of 19 Published by

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The HDD and SSD NAND FLASH partitions

 

The HDD storage partition

So in order to gain massive storage OCZ, in very simple wording, took a HDD, ties it to their OCZ SuperScale storage accelerator (their proprietary raid controller) after which you mount and format it in windows. It is that simple that is your primary storage unit. The HDD itself is a peculiar choice though, it's a 2.5" Toshiba 5400 RMP 1TB HDD often used in laptops. While read performance is OK the write performance of this device is quite average at best.

The trick is though that NVELO's Dataplex software layer caches as much as needed towards and from the NAND flash partition and that's where the performance is to be found. So let's take a look at the flash NAND partitions.

OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid

 

The SSD NAND FLASH partition

So the Hybrid storage unit we'll be testing today is a 1000 GB version and it comes with a 100GB SSD cache storage partition, 10% of your total data thus can be cached and for an actual cache that's a lot actually. The data that is most frequently used will be cached the best and remains in the top priority list, and once the SSD runs out of cache, the data that used less will be be deleted.

For this particular model OCZ places two NAND flash partition of 8 (16 total) ICs onto the PCB. The NAND FLASH partitions all get one SandForce 2281 assigned for massive multi-channel IO. The RevoDrive 3 Hybrid series uses asynchronous OCZ own branded MLC NAND (25nm) memory by the way.

What about 25nm NAND lifespan ?

For the newer 25nm NAND FLASH memories, the overall lifespan of the ICs has been reduced from 10.000 towards 5,000 program/erase cycles. Rumors are that the numbers for consumer grade 25nm NAND flash memory (as used on the SSD tested today) are even lower at 3000 program/erase cycles.

But granted, as drastic as that sounds, it's all relative as this lifespan will very likely last longer than any mechanical HDD. Drive wearing protection will help you out greatly. With a normal filled SSD and very heavy writing/usage of say 10GB data each day 365 days a year you'd be looking at roughly 22 full SSD write cycles per year, out of the 3000 (worst case scenario) available. However, all calculations on this matter are debatable as usage differs and even things like how much free space you leave on your SSD can effect the drive.

OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid

So the NAND flash partition are tied to the SF 2281 controllers which on their term are pointed towards that proprietary OCZ RAID controller, here two partitions are configured as RAID0, done twice effectively doubling up performance per array. That's roughly what you need to know about the NAND memory and SandForce controllers. Let's move onwards to that RAID unit, as it comes with a new VCA 2.0 software layer that adds some pretty snazzy features.

Let's move onwards to that RAID unit, as it comes with a new VCA 2.0 software layer that adds some pretty snazzy features.

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