OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 (480GB) Preview: 200K IOPS & 1.5GB/s for $1699?
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 28, 2011 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- SandForce
- OCZ
- RevoDrive
- SF-2000
- RevoDrive 3
- RevoDrive 3 X2
Final Words
I believe there's a very specific niche that is interested in something like the RevoDrive 3. A customer that needs the performance and is too resource limited to go after the more expensive solutions on the market. I believe it's a lot like what we did in the early days of AnandTech. A decade ago we couldn't get or afford powerful server hardware, but we needed the performance. Our solution was to build a bunch of desktops (using hardware that we did have available to us) and deploy them as our servers. The solution was incredibly fast and cost effective, exactly what we needed at the time. We of course later ran into reliability issues down the road when all of our desktop motherboards died at the same time (apparently we had a bad batch), but when they worked the systems served us well.
The RevoDrive 3 reminds me a lot of something we would've deployed back then: something that can deliver the performance but whose track record isn't proven. OCZ insists that the RevoDrive 3 isn't targeted at servers, although it fully expects users to deploy it in machines running server OSes.
The RevoDrive 3 X2's performance shouldn't be surprising. In fact, you should be able to get similar performance out of a 4-drive RAID-0 array of Vertex 3s. Unfortunately you wouldn't be able to do so on a 6-series Intel motherboard as you're limited to two 6Gbps SATA ports. You'd either need to invest in a 4-port 6Gbps SATA RAID card like this or look at AMD's 8/9-series chipset, which does make the RevoDrive 3 X2 a little more attractive. Ultimately this has been one of my biggest issues with these multi-controller PCIe SSDs, they rarely offer a tangible benefit over a DIY RAID setup.
For the majority of users the RevoDrive 3 X2 is simply overkill. I even demonstrated in some of our IO bound tests that you're bottlenecked by the workload before you're limited by the hardware. That being said, if you have the right workload - I've already shown that you can push nearly 1.5GB/s of data through the card and hit random IOPS numbers of over 180K (~756MB/s in our QD32 test). Even if you have the workload however I still have two major concerns: TRIM support and reliability.
While I'm glad you can finally secure erase the drive under Windows, missing TRIM is a tangible downside in my opinion. The only salvation is the fact that if you're running with mostly compressible data, SandForce's controllers tend to be very resilient and you probably won't miss TRIM. If your workload is predominantly incompressible (e.g. highly compressed videos, images or data of a highly random makeup) then perhaps something SandForce based isn't the best option for you to begin with.
The reliability issue is what will likely keep the RevoDrive 3 out of mission critical deployments. A single controller failure will kill your entire array, not to mention the recent unease about using anything SandForce SF-2281 based. OCZ tells me it hasn't seen a single BSOD issue on the RevoDrive 3 X2 thus far (it's currently running version 2.06 of the OCZ/SF firmware) however it'll be updated to the latest firmware before shipping in late July just in case.
As with anything else in the SSD space, I'd suggest waiting to see how the RevoDrive 3 X2 works deployed in an environment similar to your own before pulling the trigger.
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SonicIce - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
lol last sentence >evironmentmmaestro - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
You can do secure erase, is there any sort of garbage cleanup tool they also supply for maintenance? I know Intel supplies these with their SSDs for if TRIM is unavailable, and that seems like something which you ought to have to make up for this shortcoming.It's a shame OCZ started you all off with such an expensive offering. I'd be far more interested in the performance of the Revodrive 3 (no x2) 120gb or 240gb.
don_k - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
I started reading this review, saw the specs and that they removed the pci-x bridge and said to myself "This thing is gonna hit 2GB/s sequential." Close.Man is this thing fast. It is very interesting especially on a enterprise environment and that is due to the data workload, nothing else.
I personally have been running the original 120GB Revodrive (2 Sandforce 1200 controllers) and I've had absolutely zero reliability issues in 24x7 running on a linux box that is my personal workstation. Bought September 2010 so almost a year old now. I'd call that 'good', so far. Tentatively.
So what is the driver used for this under Linux? Is there one? If Ocz have made changes to firmware then they need to release a driver for linux no?
skrewler2 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
This thing probably wont be used by consumers. Why not at least include some more relevant DB benchmarks? tpcc would be a good place to start.FunBunny2 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
me too.hurricanepkt - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
OCZ uses a pretty confusing model number schema. Are either of these the revodrive 3?It seems very difficult to tell
OCZSSDPX-1RVD0240
OCZSSDPX-1RVDX0240
Conficio - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
Dear Anand,first off all for doing what you do her. I have learned so much from your SSD (and other technology coverage).
As you really have this powerful voice in the industry and have always used it in favor of the users and consumers I'd like you to shed more light on supported platforms of SSDs as part of your reviews and tests.
I have at work a Mac Pro with a couple of 120GB OCZ Vertex SSDs which got corrupted by a power outage Monday morning. Not a big deal as the data on them was of temporary nature.
However, my attempt to use that opportunity and secure erase the drives and may be update the firmware failed miserably:
* OCZ does not make it easy to find the tools
* OCZ makes you download a package for all platforms which then you have to select (w/o a guide) the "right" model and burn the tools on a CD
* The Insturctions require to set BIOS modes for ATAPI, so are PC only
* The required BIOS mode (IDE) is again PC only
* Finally I had to use PC Laptop to to boot the CD and it painfully failed to boot because of some CD driver for the CD drive missing.
So to actually restore the drive to factory conditions one needs to have some very specific hardware (if it works at all then, never got to that point).
In my book this is clearly poor customer support and platform support. I'd like to see more details about the actually supported platforms for this new technology including the secure erase tooling (or other tooling that OCZ does provide, like some form of garbage collection tool).
neotiger - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
1) All the benchmarks are for desktop apps. I really doubt people would be buying PCIe SSD for "Starcraft II & WoW" (!!) Far more likely people would be using it for MySQL, Solr, Hadoop, VM. Can we get a benchmark based on those apps?2) You only tested random read at low queue depth and simply concluded that "Low queue depth random read performance is nothing to be impressed by." What about high queue depth? Random read IO at high concurrency and high queue depth is just about the *MOST* important metrics for server SSD uses -- yes even more important than random write IO. Yet you completely skip over that. Any chance you can update the benchmark to include results at high concurrency and high queue depth?
alphadog4 - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link
One way this review would be nice is if we built 4x80GB striped RAID with a SAS controller setup and compared. I'm just not sure what I am gaining here.chadwilson - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link
I really really really would like to see some server testing done with server class devices. Specifically I'd like to see the testing done on a modern *nix kernel, as this type of device will likely see usage in this environment.