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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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.