OCZ's RevoDrive Preview: An Affordable PCIe SSD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 25, 2010 2:15 AM ESTOverall System Performance using PCMark Vantage & SYSMark
Next up is PCMark Vantage, another system-wide performance suite. For those of you who aren’t familiar with PCMark Vantage, it ends up being the most real-world-like hard drive test I can come up with. It runs things like application launches, file searches, web browsing, contacts searching, video playback, photo editing and other completely mundane but real-world tasks. I’ve described the benchmark in great detail before but if you’d like to read up on what it does in particular, take a look at Futuremark’s whitepaper on the benchmark; it’s not perfect, but it’s good enough to be a member of a comprehensive storage benchmark suite. Any performance impacts here would most likely be reflected in the real world.
Years ago I did an article tackling the real world performance improvement by putting two hard drives in RAID-0. I argued that for most users, the performance improvement wasn’t worth the trouble. PCMark Vantage maintains that this is the case. The RevoDrive is only 7% faster than a single Vertex 2. All this tells us is that for typical desktop usage models you won’t get a huge performance boost.
The memories suite includes a test involving importing pictures into Windows Photo Gallery and editing them, a fairly benign task that easily falls into the category of being very influenced by disk performance.
The TV and Movies tests focus on on video transcoding which is mostly CPU bound, but one of the tests involves Windows Media Center which tends to be disk bound.
The gaming tests are very well suited to SSDs since they spend a good portion of their time focusing on reading textures and loading level data. All of the SSDs dominate here, but as you'll see later on in my gaming tests the benefits of an SSD really vary depending on the game. Take these results as a best case scenario of what can happen, not the norm.
In the Music suite the main test is a multitasking scenario: the test simulates surfing the web in IE7, transcoding an audio file and adding music to Windows Media Player (the most disk intensive portion of the test).
The Communications suite is made up of two tests, both involving light multitasking. The first test simulates data encryption/decryption while running message rules in Windows Mail. The second test simulates web surfing (including opening/closing tabs) in IE7, data decryption and running Windows Defender.
I love PCMark's Productivity test; in this test there are four tasks going on at once, searching through Windows contacts, searching through Windows Mail, browsing multiple webpages in IE7 and loading applications. This is as real world of a scenario as you get and it happens to be representative of one of the most frustrating HDD usage models - trying to do multiple things at once. There's nothing more annoying than trying to launch a simple application while you're doing other things in the background and have the load take forever.
The final PCMark Vantage suite is HDD specific and this is where you'll see the biggest differences between the drives:
SYSMark 2007 hammers the point home as well - if you’re running more CPU bound tasks you won’t see a benefit to the RevoDrive.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
62 Comments
View All Comments
cgaspar - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
If you re-flash the card with SIL3124 non-RAID BIOS, it should look just like 2 SSDs, and TRIM should work.oshato - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
I too would like to see the pass through configuration ( non-raided ) tested for TRIM support and db IOPS #s. Curious how feasible this would be for a zfs ZIL in pass through mode.marraco - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
I'm worried about video performance in single and dual setups with this SSD working.marraco - Monday, June 28, 2010 - link
What about boot time?the RAID controller should increase the POST time, and that frequently destroys the boot advantage of SSD under RAID.
javaman3 - Tuesday, June 29, 2010 - link
Does anyone know if this card will work in OSX? I would like to know specifically if it will run in an Xserve.clarkn0va - Tuesday, June 29, 2010 - link
I think there's another, if less common need for this: places where you lack drive bays or SATA ports. Some examples:-SFF servers, most of which accommodate only 1 3.5" drive or 2 2.5" drives. Would be nice to have a little 1U Atom board running a small NAS/application server and cram a little more storage in. I have a mini-ITX server doing nfs, torrents, voip, monitoring, etc and would love to move it to a small rack, but until now couldn't justify the loss of drive space. With the OS and applications running on a RevoDrive, bulk data can live on a pair of 2.5" drives and we're all good.
-Enterprise servers. I'm shopping out a terminal server at work and the cost of purchasing drives with your new server is laughable. The highest-end SLC drives from Intel and OCZ cost less than the OEM-branded grab-bag the server vendors are offering. I would much rather put my own drives in there, thanks, and cruising ebay for compatible drive caddies just feels wrong. pcie slots, on the other hand, come with the server without paying some stupid OEM storage premium.
Now the questions.
1. The article says you configure your own RAID-0. Will the utility also let me configure it as RAID-1 if I want?
2. Anybody know what it's like to try to boot Linux from one of these devices?
cosplay - Thursday, July 8, 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
clarkn0va - Friday, July 9, 2010 - link
What are the lengths of these 2 cards? I'd really like to put one in a case that only takes half-length cards.LightningCrashTSI - Wednesday, July 14, 2010 - link
FTA:"The OCZ RevoDrive will offer lower CPU utilization than an on-board software based RAID solution thanks to its Silicon Image RAID controller,"The Silicon Image RAID controller is a software-based RAID controller as well.
Conradical314 - Thursday, August 12, 2010 - link
The important question is, which Firefly episode?Was at first very disappointed to hear about this drive, but thanks to your review I see it would only have made a small effect on actual usage, so I don't need to regret recently getting OCZ Vertex II 120GB too much.