OCZ's RevoDrive Preview: An Affordable PCIe SSD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 25, 2010 2:15 AM ESTNo TRIM, No Idle Garbage Collection
Unlike the OCZ Z-Drive, the RevoDrive has no idle time garbage collection support. There’s obviously no TRIM support given that the drive runs in an internal RAID, however OCZ is apparently working on a TRIM tool for both the Revo and Z-Drives. There’s absolutely no word on when we might see such a thing, so at this point you’d much have to treat the RevoDrive as not support any sort of TRIM. The only hope you have for keeping performance high is the usual garbage collection that happens whenever you write to the drive.
Thankfully the SandForce controllers are extremely resilient and generally don’t really drop in performance with normal desktop usage. I can however get the drive’s performance to drop if I torture the thing for a while:
Write speed drops in the worst case scenario to just under 200MB/s. That’s by no means terrible, but it does bring the drive closer to the performance of a single Vertex 2 SSD. Do I believe that through normal use your drive would ever end up in this state? No, but it is definitely possible for performance to drop over time depending on the workload as I’ve explained time and time again. It’s just far less likely on something SandForce based. This is also not just limited to the RevoDrive. You’d run into the same problem with a pair of Vertex 2s in RAID-0.
The hope here is that OCZ will be able to deliver some sort of a manual TRIM tool in the future. It’s been several months since the Z-Drive’s release and we haven’t seen any mention of TRIM there, so I wouldn’t count on a quick introduction. I’m hearing we could see something in a matter of weeks but I’m not sure about that.
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Demon-Xanth - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
That connector is called a MICTOR (not sure on the spelling). It's made to hook a logic analyzer up to and generally not useful for most people.Trisagion - Saturday, June 26, 2010 - link
Doesn't look like a MICTOR to me. A MICTOR has contacts aligned along the center, this one has contacts that are on aligned on opposite sides along the center.flgt - Saturday, June 26, 2010 - link
It looks like the Samtec version of the MICTOR. QSH series maybe. Same concept though. High speed, impedance controlled debug or board-to-board connector.Trisagion - Sunday, June 27, 2010 - link
Yes, I think you're right. Thanks!mrmike_1949 - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
whenever you test ssd, you should still include a fast hdd as a reference point!mckirkus - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
Seconded. A VRaptor would have been a good idea. Also, can you RAID two of these like SLI vid cards?Intel clearly has RAID figured out. I'm guessing they're going to drop their on version of this thing in Q4 with 22nm flash and blow everybody else out of the water. I also wonder what the latency is like going through all of those bridges and controllers. PCI-e is supposed to be lower latency than SATA right?
Voo - Saturday, June 26, 2010 - link
The problem with that is, that even the fastest 15k rpm SCSI drive would still be nothing more than a bar in most benchmarks, so not really that usefull and if you're interested in it you could always use bench.Though you have a point that it'd be a helpful reminder of the huge difference between HHDs and SSDs and would show that the differences even between the fastest/slowest SSDs aren't that important if compared to HDDs.
chemist1 - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
OK, when can they shrink one of these onto an express card, so I can plug it into the PCIe slot on my early-2008 MacBook Pro (whose SATA interface is limited to 150 MB/s)?aya2work - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
Anand,Your storage bench are very interesting and looks like most adequate storage test. Do you have any plans to make it available for other users? (for personal use)
ps: sorry for poor English
Breit - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
Is it possible to change the stripe size on the RevoDrive's internal RAID-0 in the SI BIOS? I did a little research myself regarding stripe sizes in SSD-RAID-0's and found that a 16kb stripe size is ideal for overall performance instead of the default 64kb (at least on Intel ICH10-R). With that configured a Vertex LE RAID-0 (x2) could easily come from around 40K to 80-90K in the Vantage HDD Suite.