OCZ's RevoDrive Preview: An Affordable PCIe SSD

Final 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.