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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GullLars - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
Seconded.The stripe size can have a dramatic impact on performance.
I'd also love to see 4KB random read @ QD 32, but maybe i'll have to wait for some other enthusiast to download CDM 3.0 and post a screenshot...
The sequential read scaling found was horrible, 290MB/s from 2R0 120GB SandForce drives is low. How about an ATTO comparison to show a broader spectrum of sequentials?
Qapa - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
They should make the 240GB version with 4 "drives" in RAID 0, that could make it more interesting... and I guess no one would mind paying twice the value of the 120GB, $740 for a drive that can, at times be almost 4x faster than a Vertex 2.mapesdhs - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
Since these are PCIe devices, did you guys try striping more than one of them by any chance?
Heh, looking forward to when we get RamSan-620 speed & capacity on a single card. :D
Ian.
Zstream - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
So how are these supposed to stack against other enterprise hardware companies? With no trim support, this would definitely kill the thought to purchase these.http://www.violin-memory.com/
kurt2000 - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
if it is raided, does it support trim on the raid ctrl ?ggathagan - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
Which part of "No TRIM, No Garbage Collection" confused you?RaistlinZ - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
No TRIM is expected.But no garbage collection? Bleh. I'll wait until it at least supports GC. OCZ's reliability on their SSD's has been shoddy lately, which makes me want to hold off even more.
seapeople - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
Oh goodie, I can't wait until we have a drive that's 10 times faster than the Intel x25-m and only costs 10 times as much! Maybe after that, we'll get something even faster, for even more money!!Seriously, the problem with SSD's is not that they're too slow, it's that they're too expensive. Drives like this aren't exactly helping in that regard.
MC-Sammer - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
I wonder if there would be any kind of noticeable im[improvement in sped if you put it on an ASUS p6t V2 and overclock the PCIe bus (any board with this function really)Very cool article *thumbs up*
bumble12 - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
$369 for 120GB£316 for 120GB
http://www.scan.co.uk/Search.aspx?q=OCZ+Revo
:(