OCZ's RevoDrive Preview: An Affordable PCIe SSD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 25, 2010 2:15 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench
The first in our benchmark suite is a light usage case. The Windows 7 system is loaded with Firefox, Office 2007 and Adobe Reader among other applications. With Firefox we browse web pages like Facebook, AnandTech, Digg and other sites. Outlook is also running and we use it to check emails, create and send a message with a PDF attachment. Adobe Reader is used to view some PDFs. Excel 2007 is used to create a spreadsheet, graphs and save the document. The same goes for Word 2007. We open and step through a presentation in PowerPoint 2007 received as an email attachment before saving it to the desktop. Finally we watch a bit of a Firefly episode in Windows Media Player 11.
There’s some level of multitasking going on here but it’s not unreasonable by any means. Generally the application tasks proceed linearly, with the exception of things like web browsing which may happen in between one of the other tasks.
The recording is played back on all of our drives here today. Remember that we’re isolating disk performance, all we’re doing is playing back every single disk access that happened in that ~5 minute period of usage. The light workload is composed of 37,501 reads and 20,268 writes. Over 30% of the IOs are 4KB, 11% are 16KB, 22% are 32KB and approximately 13% are 64KB in size. Less than 30% of the operations are absolutely sequential in nature. Average queue depth is 6.09 IOs.
The performance results are reported in average I/O Operations per Second (IOPS):
The OCZ RevoDrive does very well in our light usage case, but it does echo what we saw in the PCMark results. The performance benefit here is 27% however that’s purely I/O. Taken in the context of the real world with CPU and other bottlenecks you’re probably looking at a 7 - 15% performance advantage. Thankfully the RevoDrive doesn’t come with a high premium, making the added performance very cost effective.
If there’s a light usage case there’s bound to be a heavy one. In this test we have Microsoft Security Essentials running in the background with real time virus scanning enabled. We also perform a quick scan in the middle of the test. Firefox, Outlook, Excel, Word and Powerpoint are all used the same as they were in the light test. We add Photoshop CS4 to the mix, opening a bunch of 12MP images, editing them, then saving them as highly compressed JPGs for web publishing. Windows 7’s picture viewer is used to view a bunch of pictures on the hard drive. We use 7-zip to create and extract .7z archives. Downloading is also prominently featured in our heavy test; we download large files from the Internet during portions of the benchmark, as well as use uTorrent to grab a couple of torrents. Some of the applications in use are installed during the benchmark, Windows updates are also installed. Towards the end of the test we launch World of Warcraft, play for a few minutes, then delete the folder. This test also takes into account all of the disk accesses that happen while the OS is booting.
The benchmark is 22 minutes long and it consists of 128,895 read operations and 72,411 write operations. Roughly 44% of all IOs were sequential. Approximately 30% of all accesses were 4KB in size, 12% were 16KB in size, 14% were 32KB and 20% were 64KB. Average queue depth was 3.59.
Our heavy test shows the RevoDrive nearly doubles the performance of a single OCZ Vertex 2.
The gaming workload is made up of 75,206 read operations and only 4,592 write operations. Only 20% of the accesses are 4KB in size, nearly 40% are 64KB and 20% are 32KB. A whopping 69% of the IOs are sequential, meaning this is predominantly a sequential read benchmark. The average queue depth is 7.76 IOs.
Our gaming workload also improves a bit as well. This thing is quick. A pair of Vertex 2s in RAID are still faster thanks to Intel's controller.
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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.