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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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.