OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid PCIe Hybrid SSD Review

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by Robert Tanner on March 5, 2012 in Storage

SSDs are expensive and often don’t offer enough capacity to meet user needs. The recent SSD caching craze attempts to alleviate both these issues, but OCZ has done one better. Combining a RevoDrive 3 with a 1TB HDD the RevoDrive Hybrid offers a self-contained SSD caching solution that is guaranteed to work.

Page 3 – Synthetic: PCMark 7

Futuremark’s PCMark benchmarking suite should need no introduction as it has been a staple of PC benchmarks for the better half of a decade. PCMark offers a range of tests to gauge every aspect of a computer’s performance and presents it in a neat simple final result. Thankfully it also breaks down the overall score with individual subsystem scores (such as Memory, Storage, etc) in addition to given individual test results.

With the latest 2011 release of PCMark 7 we should hopefully see quite a few changes to how SSDs are handled, and the resulting scores computed, as previously, results were biased towards sequential read and write performance. With its Windows 7 focus PCMark 7 offers a variety of storage system tests, such as simulating a Windows Defender scan and using Windows Media Center to using other built-in programs for video and music file manipulation. But for those that just want a nice overarching score, it has those too.

PCMark 7 Professional

Right off the bat we have some interesting results. Despite packing two SF-2281 controllers, performance is just a few points of the 256GB Crucial m4 SSD. This has to do with how the RevoDrive Hybrid is built; basically it utilizes two 60GB SF-2281 powered SSDs in tandem. For various reasons solid-state drives tend to reach peak performance between 128GB and 256GB capacities, and the smaller the capacity the lower the performance. At the same time, pairing two controllers in tandem provides significant benefits in burst operations and high I/O workloads, which can easily offset the hit in sequential write performance.

With that said, although it did not take a clean sweep, the Hybrid puts up some very respectable performance here, made all the more impressive considering this is actually a large capacity, low-speed laptop drive with a pair of 60GB caching SSDs in front of it. This is a promising start so far.

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