What's the RevoDrive Hybrid series all about ?
What's the RevoDrive Hybrid series all about ?
As probably you must understand by now, OCZ's new PCI Express solid state drive is based on a hybrid design which combines a regular HDD with an SSD.
You as an end-user will be able to benefit from the large storage capacities offered by today's platter-based HDD drives, as well as from the high speeds and low access time provided by SSDs, as that SSD will be used as a fast memory cache for the HDD. OCZ opts to use a pretty standard 2.5-inch HDD and offers the RevoDrive Hybrid either in 500GB or 1TB capacities to you.
The SSD part of the device is actually empowered by the new RevoDrive 3, which when we examine the PCB has been left pretty much unaltered despite minor alterations here and there. That's outside of the HDD daughterboard that is installed on it.
This means that the RevoDrive Hybrid uses SandForce SF-2281 controllers setup to run over a RAID controller in RAID-0 mode, that on its end is connected to a PCI Express bridge chip.
OCZ uses their own RAID solution with a proprietary VCA 2.0 software layer (we'll explain this later). The raid solution is called the OCZ SuperScale storage accelerator that enables scalable SSD performance and reduces the host CPU cycles and thus load. The card goes into an empty PCI-Express Gen. 2 x4 interface slot (but can also be inserted in a x8/x16 slot).
Interesting to see is that the NAND flash type has been changed to the newer and all to familiar 25nm series, branded by OCZ themselves.
As far as performance is concerned, the San Jose-based company said that the drive is able to achieve read and transfer rates of 910MB/s and 810MB/s, respectively, while random 4K read performance is estimated at 65,000 IOPS Writes (average).
Now, please do understand that these are always best case scenarios and based on peak performance. Your non-cached sustained and linear writes will show a somewhat different picture.
Good to know is that the RevoDrive Hybrid is bootable, but you need to supply Windows with the appropriate drivers to recognize the controller. OCZ provides you with a set of drivers for the controller (download them through their website) and you are on your way. Windows 7 x64 installed without any problem. Once in Windows you'll need to install a secondary software suite for caching though, more on that later on in the article.
Let's have a more detailed look at the actual product, anyone wants some cream on that ?
