A Quick Look at OCZ's RevoDrive x2: IBIS Performance without HSDL
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 4, 2010 1:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- OCZ
- RevoDrive
- RevoDrive x2
Random Read/Write Performance
Our random tests use Iometer to sprinkle random reads/writes across an 8GB space of the entire drive for 3 minutes, somewhat approximating the random workload a high end desktop/workstation would see.
We present our default results at a queue depth of 3, as well as more stressful results at a queue depth of 32. The latter is necessary to really stress a four-way RAID 0 of SF-1200s, and also quite unrealistic for a desktop (more of a workstation/server workload at this point).
We also use Iometer's standard pseudo random data for each request as well as fully random data to show the min and max performance for SandForce based drives. The type of performance you'll see really depends on the nature of the data you're writing.
At best a single RevoDrive x2 (or four SF-1200 drives in RAID-0) can achieve over 500MB/s of 4KB random reads/writes. At worst? 286MB/s of random writes.
Sequential Read/Write Performance
Our standard sequential tests write 128KB blocks to the drive, with a queue depth of 1, for 60 seconds straight. As was the case above, we present default as well as results with a 32 deep I/O queue. Pseudo random as well as fully random data is used to give us an idea of min and max performance.
The RevoDrive x2, like the IBIS, can read at up to 800MB/s. Write speed is an impressive 677MB/s. That's peak performance - worst case performance is down at 196MB/s for light workloads and 280MB/s for heavy ones. With SandForce so much of your performance is dependent on the type of data you're moving around. Highly compressible data won't find a better drive to live on, but data that's already in reduced form won't move around anywhere near as quickly.
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me&er - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
Anand,I've Secure Erased both Revo x2 and IBIS a number of times using hdparm.
Infact, it's my preferred method with all SSD.
Here's the methodology:
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread...
Regards,
ezinner - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
Argh! Why do motherboard and peripheral manufacturer's take so long to release port upgrades? They churn out new processors and chipsets all the time, but lag behind on interconnecting high speed devices. I am so sick of the USB 2.0, serial and parallel ports still found many motherboards. Give me USB 3 and the new Intel optical interface. First you have to mass market them, then devices will come out that supprt them. Give us faster lanes. Music vendors are even worse. Keyboards still were using floppy drives and scsi ports during the last decade and use slower, lower capacity sd-ram.Kevin G - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
Chipsets are proprietary but high speed interconnects like SATA, USB ect. are industry standards which anyone can make devices for. Proprietary designs are easier to build as the designers know exactly the limited number of devices they interface with.The other issue with standards is that until chipsets include them, they'll incur an extra cost via an external chip for motherboard manufacturers. Thus even though the standard is complete and available, there will be some resistance for acceptance.
anon1234 - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
Does this card offer management of the RAID controller, i.e. can the RAID be turned off (JBOD mode)? There are a couple of scenarios where having 4 separate 'drives' is preferable to a single stripe set.Does TRIM still work if you do RAID/striping in software?
Spazweasel - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
Don't underestimate the value of ease-of-installation. That can add up pretty quickly to even a moderate sized organization. If it only takes a couple of minutes to install or swap a drive-on-a-card, versus drive-in-a-HD-format, you can make up the premium in price quickly.wojtek240 - Friday, November 5, 2010 - link
I somewhat liked the review but the ad and the review at the same time, its just a bit too much Ananad, credibility is still #1 for some folks.JarredWalton - Friday, November 5, 2010 - link
Advertisements are from a completely separate company, and they're basically "randomly" selected. I say randomly in quotes because I'm not even sure of all the details--some company could buy all of the storage ad space for a month if they were so inclined. I've read many a magazine where an ad appears opposite a review, and in some cases those are very negative reviews.Any good (and smart) company keeps editorial staff separate from the advertising, and AnandTech operates that way. I can say with 100% honesty that no one has ever asked me to deal with advertising, and that never once has anyone suggested I give a better review to a product because they're "a big advertiser." In fact, I know of a couple instances where companies have threatened to pull advertising because of negative (or at least not glowing) reviews, and Anand pretty much said see you later.
Other than that, I'm not sure what in this article would undermine credibility based on the ads anyway, as my impression is more of a, "yeah, it works, and it's like RAID-0 with four SSDs only you use a single PCIe slot. It carries a price premium as well, secure erase can be iffy, TRIM doesn't work so you have to depend on idle garbage collection, and we encountered a bug on SandForce when writing lots of uncompressable data". That's definitely not enough for me to want to jump at the Revo X2, especially considering the price.
adonn78 - Friday, November 5, 2010 - link
How much faster will it boot my PC over other SSD's or RAided drives? how long will it load a level of the 5 most popular games? Five us real world tangible statistics... IO's mean nothing to a gamer.krazyderek - Friday, November 5, 2010 - link
the OCZ vertex 2 120gb x 2 seems to be lacking QD32 benchmarks to compare it at the same performance metric, also shouldn't OCZ vertex 2 120gb x 4 also been included since that's the apples to apples comparison to a revo drive x2 in terms of controller count??And for that matter, why isn't the original revodrive shown for reference aswell?
i'm blown away by the revodrive x2 unfortunately that's cause there aren't any other numbers to compare it too...
AnnonymousCoward - Friday, November 5, 2010 - link
I couldn't find the PCIe gen in this article or the original RevoDrive one. Another site says it's PCIe 1. With all the talk about bandwidth, this is relevant. So PCIe 1 x4 = 1GB/s, and you used 804MB of that.Also, the charts are sort of hard to read with all the text and common colors; here's a way to improve it: http://i53.tinypic.com/3480bw4.png
Otherwise, good review. I think motherboards need to start including non-graphics multi-lane PCIe to accommodate high bandwidth drives.