OCZ's RevoDrive Preview: An Affordable PCIe SSD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 25, 2010 2:15 AM ESTFinal Words
For those who have a need for it, the OCZ RevoDrive performs very well. For a little more than the cost a single SandForce drive you get much better performance; as much as double depending on the situation.
Most desktop users would find it difficult to realize a measurable performance difference between the RevoDrive and a single Vertex 2. While the jump from a HDD to SSD is significant enough in most day to day tasks to tell the difference, application launch times and most conventional desktop uses won’t be affected by the RevoDrive. This product falls into that category of if you have to ask why, it’s not for you. Thankfully at OCZ's aggressive price points, you may not really have to ask why.
As far as the architecture of the drive goes, there doesn’t appear to be any downside to OCZ’s PCI-X to PCIe solution. The Sil3124 controller does appear to be, on average, slower than Intel's ICH10R however not by a degree that would be noticeable in most real world scenarios. It all boils down to price. If OCZ is able to deliver a single 120GB RevoDrive at $369.99 this is going to be a very tempting value. Cheaper than a pair of Vertex 2s in RAID, you could get twice the performance of a single SandForce drive for only $20 more. That’s huge. While OCZ tells me that at least initially the Revo will be cheaper than a pair of smaller Vertex 2s in RAID, you'll have to keep an eye on pricing before making any purchasing decisions. It's really the cost that makes the RevoDrive so appetizing.
The kinks I encountered would obviously need resolving first. If a selling point of the drive is to be a simplified solution for those who want more performance than a single SSD, it needs to work like a black box. While I appreciate OCZ allowing the end user the insight into what’s going on with the RAID array, I want to see something that just works like a normal SSD. I’ll give it another look once mass production hardware is available and see if these lingering issues have been resolved.
While SandForce’s architecture is particularly resilient, I would encourage OCZ to continue to push for TRIM support on its PCIe SSDs. I’ve been using SandForce drives without TRIM under OS X for the past few months now without any sign of slowdown. Even for the most strenuous desktop workloads I don’t believe the lack of TRIM would be noticeable on the RevoDrive. It’s the corner case scenarios that I’m most concerned about. If you are too, then waiting for some sort of a TRIM tool makes sense.
Ultimately I believe there is a future in these PCIe based SSDs. If we ever find ourselves in a situation with 6Gbps SATA where we are bandwidth limited, turning to PCIe as an alternative for high speed storage might make a lot of sense. OCZ showed us that it's possible to drive the cost down, now it's just a matter of improving controller and NAND performance.
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orangpelupa - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
"It'll offer up to twice the performance of a Vertex 2 SSD for only $20 more when it ships in July."lol i read that wrong.
and though the SSD only priced @ $20 >_<
HollyDOL - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
Nice reading, thanks for another SSD review.btw, on Installation and Early Issues you have a typo:
I headed into the Silicon Image BIOS, asked to recreate the array, specified the entire 233GB
should be 223GB ;-)
Rajinder Gill - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
Thanks for point that out, it's fixed.-Raja
TonyB - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
would have been nice to see this thing saturate the PCIe 4x bus on sequentials (1GB/s?). but alas we get a hardly faster if not equal device similar to the Crucial C300 on a sata3 channel.i'll pass thanks.
Phate-13 - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
Recently encountered a very interesting ssd, seems like crucial launched a new ssd, 64GB version. And at $150, it's a bargain for it's performance. It's not only cheaper then an Intel Postville per Gigabyte, it's also seems to be faster.http://www.crucial.com/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODUL...
(Didn't know where else to put this tip.)
therealnickdanger - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
Wow, that is fantastic! I guess I never even thought to look for a smaller C300 model, but 64GB is really all that I need. @ $150, that's clearly the BEST deal around! Two of those in RAID-0 is $300 and would destroy the Revo or Z!vol7ron - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
You must not read any articles here.In order of occurrence (later to newer):
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2909
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2974/crucial-s-reals...
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3694/crucial-release...
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3704/crucial-realssd...
Phate-13 - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
You must only read the titles of the articles here.1. The 64GB version is new, and a lot cheaper then the 128GB version. The 128GB costs more then double that of the 64GB.
2. If your not trying to point out that it is not new, but the fact that there are problems with it, read the last article:
"The update should go live while I'm out of the country, but it looks like by the end of this month things should finally (hopefully?) be safe for C300 owners. "
It's been two months, so things should be ok by now.
So if you got some information about CURRENT affairs, that would be appreciated, and for the rest, that is interesting reading material for people who are interested in the ssd indeed, but for the rest, I know that already. The only thing I'm interested in right now if there still are those problems.
Qapa - Saturday, June 26, 2010 - link
Hi Anand,Can you give us an update indicating if everything is working fine by now or if there are still problems?
Of course, more problems can appear later on but just to know if, for now, it seems to be ok...
Thanks,
Qapa
Trisagion - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
Can anybody please tell me the <b><i>name</i></b> of that connector above the SI chip? I know it's an expansion slot for a daughter board, but what is it called? It's driving me crazy!