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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nurd - Saturday, June 26, 2010 - link
The SiI 3124 is just a standard SATA controller; the RAID is software.And not everybody uses drivers written by Silicon Image, or for Windows :)
Nomgle - Monday, July 5, 2010 - link
Erm, that's completely wrong - i suggest you read this review again, and pay careful attention to the RAID-setup screenshots...The Silicon Image 3124 used on this card, IS a RAID controller, and does require drivers.
vol7ron - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
"The PCIe x8 card was made up of four Indilinx barefoot controllers configured in RAID-0, delivering up to four times the performance of a single Indilinx SSD but on a single card."Is this something that you witnessed?
When you have 4 channels of RAID-0, I thought the performance was more exponential. 2 drives/memory chips in parallel may be twice the performance, but 3 drives would be more like 4+ times times the performance.
I think having the daughter board would really change things.
Also, doesn't Intel have a TRIM driver for their RAID controller?
vol7ron
Mr Perfect - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
It should be linear growth, minus overhead.Performance would have to be additive. Three drives can't be four times the performance of one drive. If one drive achieves 55.7MB/s, then you could theoretically get 55.7x3=167.1MB/s from three or 55.7x4=222.8MB/s from four. Considering each drive will only ever be able to put out 55.7MB/s, then how could three achieve 222.8 total? Dividing the 222.8MB/s by 3 would give you 74.2 MB/s output from each drive, when they are physically only capable of 55.7MB/s each. The math would get even wonkier as you scaled higher up the exponential curve.
kmmatney - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
You really need to include SSDs and hard drives in the Benchmarks feature of this website. It would really help for people upgrading from older drives, such as first gen drives, or other drives that you wouldn't be able to inlucde in teh benchamrks for every single review.knowom - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
I'm still waiting on a modern I-Ram priced reasonably with PCI-E bandwidth with a flash card slot for data retention preferably accessible from the PCI-E retention bracket for convenient access and ability to make it hot swappable and DDR3 dimm slots angled diagonally so you could fit more dimm slots and the manufacturer could fit more easily by elongating the PCB like with video cards as well.How a modern I-Ram device would be done ideally
except angled more optimally for capacity in mind
---------------------------------------------------------------------
| | dimm slots |
| Flash | / / / / / / / / |
| | / / / / / / / / |
| ---------------- / / / / / / / / |
| / / / / / / / / |
| PCI-E / / / / / / / / |
--------__________-------------------------------------------
iwodo - Saturday, June 26, 2010 - link
Until SandForce SATA 3.0 version of Controller comes out. It will be faster then Revo.The Next Mile Stone is 1GB/s, while making it stays the same price........
sunshine - Saturday, June 26, 2010 - link
Regarding the 64GB Crucial RealSSD C300:This 64 GB version of this SSD, has a much slower write speed than the 256 GB version.
Write speeds vary with capacity:
70MB/s for the 64GB model, 140MB for 128GB and 215MB/s for the 256GB.
So apparently there is a trade off, lower price, but lower speed as well.
lukeevanssi - Saturday, June 26, 2010 - link
I am thinking of buying a E-revo 1/16 scale. I was wondering how well does this truck drive on grass if i put dual battery packs on it?. Can it climb well on dirt mounds? Thanksif anybody want to know more about it so plz visit this link:-
http://www.healthproductreviewers.com/force-factor...
there is a lot off knowledge about this product
529th - Saturday, June 26, 2010 - link
My Vertex LE died about 2 weeks ago.