OCZ Adds a Hard Drive to its RevoDrive Hybrid PCIe SSD

ASUS isn’t the only company showing off product at Computex that likes to combine things, it seems. OCZ, a company with a knack of doing some innovative things with solid-state storage, has done it once again with its ‘RevoDrive Hybrid’. What could possibly be combined with an SSD, you ask? Well, if we look at what Seagate has done with 4GB of NAND flash and what Intel has done with Smart Response, the answer should be obvious: a hard drive.

The idea behind the RevoDrive Hybrid is not unlike the aforementioned solutions, but it does stand the best chance of giving people the best mix of both storage space and SSD performance. Slapped onto the RevoDrive is a 2.5″ mechanical drive, but at this point in time, OCZ hasn’t announced a vendor, nor seems to have decided on one. To have the SSD and HDD work in unison, the company has adopted the use of software called ‘Dataplex’, from developer Nvelo.

The combining of an SSD and HDD isn’t a new idea, but this solution would be able to provide two major advantages: unparalleled performance and huge storage space. On Seagate’s solution, a meager 4GB of NAND flash is employed, while on Intel’s solution, it’ll top out at 64GB. With the RevoDrive, we could see SSD sizes of up to 120GB, and that’s a lot of cache storage. With this kind of configuration, that 500GB mechanical drive could feel like an SSD. Rather than just the OS and certain applications loading faster, a lot more could be as well, such as games and frequently-used documents.

The RevoDrive Hybrid doesn’t look pretty, but if perfected, this could prove to be one of the most interesting storage solutions out there.

Full credit for the information on this product and the image below belongs to our friends at The Tech Report.

With OCZ now out of the memory business, we weren’t surprised to see the company’s Computex showcase dominated by solid-state drives. However, we didn’t expect to see a mechanical hard drive included in the mix. The 2.5″ drive isn’t made by OCZ, but it does ride shotgun on a new PCI Express x4 card dubbed the RevoDrive Hybrid.