OCZ RevoDrive 350 PCIe SSD Review - Introduction

Going From 0 To 1,700 MB In A Split Second...

A lot has happened to OCZ and the NAND flash storage market as a whole last year, but for OCZ the sun is shining bright in the morning again, slowly starting to set with some new product. Hey everybody and welcome to another extensive review. Today we put the OCZ RevoDrive 350 to the test, a PCI Express based SSD that is going to knock you of your feet as it is incredibly fast. Let me just quickly throw some numbers at you that will get a smile on your face, so how do 1,700 ~ 1,800 MB/s maximum read and write performance sound? Yes Sir, that's the kind of performance OCZ offers to the performance aficionados in the year 2014, and exciting it surely is. 

The world of Solid State storage technology is full of surprises and the development rate is exceedingly progressive. Last year it however turned from a growth market towards a steady market where only the big players have a real saying. Names like Micron (Crucial), Samsung, Intel and Toshiba (OCZ) will be the brands to keep an eye on. The development rate however has been going so fast that current component technology cannot keep up with the pace. The transition to SATA 3 (6G) was huge, but the minute SATA 3 was released (offering 6 Gbps transfers) these controllers already started reaching their maximum bandwidth with the latest generation SSDs. Starting with Z97 you'll be seeing a lot of M2 products, basically offering a 10 Gbps link directly from your chipset (PCIe) and later on in the year 10 Gbps Sata Express will become a thing of discussion.

So basically you will see three things trending this year, slightly faster SSDs (but these are bottlenecked due to SATA3), then you'll see the M2 devices (these will become very popular due to ease of installation versus performance), and the last trend will be a series of new PCI Express based SSD solutions. Recently we tested a couple already, Plextor, MX-Extreme all fun stuff. But there is only one name that really drives performance upwards, and that is OCZ Storage solutions. Today they release their RevoDrive 350. The OCZ RevoDrive 350 PCIe SSD is a RAID 0 solid state drive which slips into a x8 PCIe slot of your PC. The bare essence of the product is to put multiple SSD clusters into one product. The NAND flash memory is tied to SandForce 2282 multi-channel controllers (two on the 240 GB model and four on the 480 GB / 960 GB models), these controllers then lead towards another controller, a RAID controller. Combined that RAID 0 array is throwing ghastly numbers over the PCie express bus, instead of that limiting SATA connector.With 19 nm Toshiba NAND flash, SandForce controllers and a new proprietary RAID solution from OCZ, this product is about to break a record or two when it comes to performance. So let's meet the all new RevoDrive 350.

Let me just throw some numbers at you to get that tickle in your belly; 1,800 MB/s maximum read performance, or what about 1,700 MB/s maximum write performance? Insanely fast, but sure very expensive as well. Have a peek before we dive into the architecture behind the RevoDrive 350, and then put the pedal to the metal, going from 0 to 1,700 MB in a split second.