Revo... is not a dirty word! Revo... is not a... dirty word. Okay, we'll stop the Skyhooks references now.
When we saw OCZ's first offering in the PCIe-based solid state storage space, we weren't overly impressed; though it was certainly very fast, it didn't quite offer the value for money that we had hoped. The RevoDrive is that value option we've been hanging out for since Computex earlier this year, and in many ways this is the best storage solution for a lot of users.
First up is the price, and for the almost-$500 asking price you'll receive 120GB of storage space. Contained on a single PCB, the RevoDrive utilises what is effectively two separate 60GB SSDs, minus cases. The flash chips and their respective controllers are both present, hardwired into a RAID controller that manages the flow of data. The RevoDrive is configurable before booting into an operating system, though the default setting of RAID0 is generally fine for most users.
A driver is required to use the RevoDrive as a boot drive, which can be installed from a USB stick as Windows is installing, or installed later if the RevoDrive is merely used as storage.
Performance is great, and the PCIe 4x slot bandwidth removes the bottleneck provided by the SATA2 bus - though the SSDs are still limited in that their Sandforce controllers are not natively designed to handle this added headroom. Average read speeds sit at a blistering 305.2MB/s, with latencies at 0.1ms, and a huge burst of 475.2MB/s.
An unfortunate side-effect of the RAID design is that the RevoDrive loses out on TRIM support, meaning that when full the drive will be slower than fresh. Even if 110GB is used, 10GB deleted and 20GB added again, the drive will be completely used up, reducing the average read speed to 257.8MB/s.
This is still faster than a single SSD by itself, so we give a big stamp of approval to this drive, even though you sacrifice an expansion slot to use it.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012