OCZ RevoDrive 120GB PCI Express SSD

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by Robert Tanner on August 23, 2010 in Storage

Looking to upgrade your PC with a fast SSD? How fast do you want it? If you answered “ultra fast”, then OCZ’s RevoDrive is worth a look. With read speeds of 500MB/s and beyond, a PCI Express interface, and a modest price premium, this SSD is hard to ignore. We’re on the bleeding-edge here, though, so this drive isn’t without a few caveats.

Page 6 – Synthetic: HD Tune Pro 3.5, HD Tach RW3

HD Tune Pro 3.5

HD Tune has long been one of our favorite storage benchmarks, thanks in part to its ease-of-use, and its ability to deliver consistent results (which is obviously important). Since we are using HD Tune on storage devices that also house our OS, we’re unable to test the write performance, so here, we stick to both Read and Access Times.

Once again the Revo takes the top spot across the various file sizes in the read testing. And again we show the access times as these are the hallmark of solid-state drives, which can’t be underscored enough. Three milliseconds to read a 1MB file sounds like a long time by SSD standards, but in actuality it’s the quickest time here. The lone mechanical drive requires ten times as long to access the same size file by comparison. Latency isn’t just a flat value, it is determined by the size of the file operation as well as the type.

HD Tach RW/3

HD Tach is a program similar to HD Tune, and although it hasn’t been updated in a few years, it’s still decent for testing SSDs. It offers a different method for calculating burst rates, as well as offering access time measurements below 0.1ms, which is unfortunately the limit for HD Tune. With a massive new program rewrite in the works, we look forward to seeing what the upcoming new version can do.

HD Tach might be showing its age here, as it is the only program not updated to work natively in Vista or Windows 7. We can only hope that the announced future rewrite of the program will bring it up-to-date with storage technology as well as current operating systems. The RevoDrive’s results ranks in just above the old Summit drive, but given the best read results are held by a JMicron based drive and other similarly fast drives also fared poorly we aren’t going to give this benchmark too much credence.

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