OCZ RevoDrive 120GB PCI Express SSD

[PAGETITLE=Introduction][Top Ad] Large capacity hard drives with PMR tend to be surprisingly fast compared to drives as recent as five years ago, but as any enthusiast can attest, a 10,000RPM VelociRaptor hard drive is faster still. And even many non-enthusiasts have taken notice that SSDs are faster than them all, in both throughput and latency. So then that begs the question... what is faster than a SSD? Why two of them in RAID 0 of course! It didn't take long for hardcore enthusiasts to capitalize on the SSD phenomenon, and even less time to go one step further. Some keen consumers noted that by combining two small 30-40GB SSDs together in a RAID 0 array they could fix two of the largest issues with small SSDs and mitigate a third. Namely, that doing so would almost double the lower-than-typical SSD performance experienced on these cut-down solid-state drives, while doubling the minuscule capacity they offered. Yet most of all, with a keen eye a consumer could pick up two 30-40GB boot drives for the same as or even less than the cost of a single SSD with the same total capacity, and end up with better performance at the same time. SSD manufacturers also were quick to take notice and over the past couple of years have introduced a small variety of solid-state drives that were in effect two (or more) SSDs combined into one package. The obvious caveats crept back in though, with the resulting dual or quad SSD designs fetching a price premium over two stand-alone SSDs of equal capacity. This is what sets the OCZ RevoDrive apart. OCZ Technology is no stranger to combination SSD devices; look no further than the PCIe based Z-Drive or the SATA-based Colossus, for example. With the RevoDrive, OCZ aims to rectify this issue, and states that models will cost marginally more than two discrete OCZ solid-state drives of equal capacity. There are quite a few benefits for buying a single RevoDrive in place of two SSDs, particularly that the RAID array remains self-contained onboard the PCIe card. This has the dual effect of making the RAID setup transparent to the user. No drivers, software, or BIOS settings need to be configured to enable RAID... it all happens behind the scenes. Additionally, while admittedly a minor issue for some chipsets, the SATA bus will not have to deal with overhead or data saturation, and finally, users won't have to shell out more money for a decent performance RAID controller card, or settle for putting their data at unnecessary risk by using Intel's software RAID controller. The RevoDrive itself is fairly innocuous looking, at least until peering closer. The slot bracket is a classy black chrome that matches the nearly black PCB. Upon closer inspection we can see the two SandForce SF-1200 controllers, and the PI7C9X130 PCI to PCI Express switch. Although the RAID controller is unmarked save for a holographic R, the Windows 7 installation driver files indicate that it is a Silicon Image SiI 3124. OCZ Revo drives will range as small as 50GB to as large as 480GB ensuring there should be a model for every price range. Again it is worth mentioning this is a PCI Express x4 drive and can be installed into any x4 or larger slot, therefore completely avoiding the issue of SATA 3Gbit/s versus SATA 6Gbit/s slots and bottlenecks. The RevoDrive remains bootable, although during the Windows installation process users will need to copy a few RAID drivers to a USB drive and load them before the Windows 7 setup can detect the drive for installation. MLC NAND flash is utilized, and although this is a RAID 0 device, the RevoDrive retains a full three-year warranty. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Test System & Methodology] At Techgage, we strive to make sure our results are as accurate and real-world applicable as possible. We list most of the steps and processes involved in setting up and conducting our benchmarking process below, but in the interests of brevity we can't mention every last detail. If there is any pertinent information that we've inadvertently omitted or you have any thoughts, suggestions, or critiques, then please feel free to email us or post directly in our forums. This site exists for readers like you and we value your input. The table below lists the hardware used in our current storage-testing machine, which remains unchanged throughout all of our testing, with the obvious exception of the storage device. Each drive used for the sake of comparison is also listed here. Component Techgage Hard Drive Test System Processor Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 - 2.4GHz Quad-Core Motherboard Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 Memory 4GB Corsair 800MHz CAS 4 Graphics Foxconn 8800 GTS 320MB Audio On-Board Audio Storage Corsair Nova V128 128GB Intel X25-M G1 80GB Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB Kingston SSDNow V Series 128GB Kingston SSDNow V+ Series 128GB OCZ RevoDrive 120GB PCI Express OCZ Summit 60GB OCZ Vertex Turbo 120GB OCZ Vertex 2 100GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue 256GB Power Supply PC Power & Cooling Quad Silencer 750W Cooling Arctic Freezer 7 Pro Et cetera Lite-on DVD-RW Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Our Windows 7 Desktop for SSD Testing When preparing our SSD testbed for testing we follow these guidelines: General Guidelines No power-saving options are enabled in the motherboard's BIOS. AHCI is enabled in the motherboard's BIOS for best performance. HPET is configured to 64bit mode in the BIOS. Only Cold boots are utilized; for the purposes of our testing a boot is defined as the moment the power button is depressed to the moment the last systray icon and program has fully loaded after reaching the Windows 7 desktop. Auto-login is enabled. Windows 7 Optimizations User Account Control (UAC) is disabled. The OS is kept clean; no scrap files are left in between runs. Windows Update and OS power-saving settings are disabled. All solid-state drives start in a factory fresh or HDDErase fresh state prior to testing. Windows 7 is manually installed and then SYSmark 2007 Preview is installed. Due to the nature of SYSmark, Windows 7 must be reinstalled upon completion of testing in order for many programs to function normally and benchmark consistently. As not all SSDs support TRIM technology, this process is important and ensures all of the drives are in a "dirtied" state before we collect the benchmark results. For the time-being, cloned test images are not used as these can result in non-aligned partitions, which if it occurs will result in degraded SSD performance. Just as with Windows XP's default sector offset causing degraded SSD performance, non-intelligent cloning software can have the same effect. For testing, we ran all tests five times, dropping the highest and lowest results to finally average the middle three. And who said that college statistics class wouldn't prove useful? If any anomalous results were seen, the test was run again. Given the complexities of modern computers, and especially today's operating systems, we feel this provides the most accurate results possible. Finally, we are seeking to constantly improve and expand upon our SSD testing methodology. We are activity seeking real-world workload scenarios that are bottlenecked by hard drives, so if you have any suggestions whatsoever or there is a program you would like to see included in our SSD content, then please drop by our forums and let us know! We are always looking to expand our SSD benchmarks and provide more useful and real-world results, and not just synthetic numbers. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Synthetic: PCMark Vantage] There are few PC enthusiasts who are unfamiliar with the name "Futuremark", as the Finland-based developer has been producing quality benchmarks to help us gauge our computer's worth for years. Originally known as Madonion, Futuremark has expanded its focus to go beyond its bread and butter, graphics and gaming, and tackle other areas, such as full system performance. That's where PCMark comes into play. The company's most recent addition to the PCMark family is Vantage. For most users, a full suite would be run, but because we're focused on storage performance only, we instead run only the storage-specific tests. Fortunately, Futuremark makes this easy for us to do as it has split up the entire suite into seven separate sub-tests, one being the aptly named "HDD Suite". PCMark's HDD Suite may look simple on the surface, but it's actually quite exhaustive. While the benchmark does deliver a simple "overall" result, it actually tests I/O performance based on a variety of scenarios, from adding music to Windows Media Player, to loading applications in succession, to editing video, to running a malware scanner, and more. It even includes metrics to evaluate a simulated Windows Vista boot time, so Futuremark has done a fine job of combining many useful scenarios into a single button press. Before jumping into the results, keep in mind that the SiliconEdge Blue uses the identical JMicron drive controller as the SNV425. The only difference is Western Digital wrote its own custom firmware. To date all other SSD manufacturers that use JMicron's controllers use the firmware supplied by that company. Therefore while it would be easy to dismiss the controller outright, the SiliconEdge Blue results do show what optimized firmware can do with this controller. With that over with, onto the results! We suspect the results speak for themselves. The increase in the overall PCMark Vantage score is significant, but when focusing solely on the HDD suite score, the RevoDrive makes the Vertex 2 seem like yesterday's news. We should mention this is highly ironic given the Revo uses the same SandForce SF-1200 controller as the Vertex 2... the only difference being two are utilized in a RAID 0 configuration. Performance jumps as significant as these are a rarity in the computer hardware realm, where successive processor and graphics card launches bring reasonable but moderate gains of at most 20% or less, on average. 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OCZ RevoDrive 120GB PCI Express SSD

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