OCZ Announces RevoDrive Hybrid SSD+HDD PCIe Solution

Three months ago, during Computex, OCZ showed off its latest RevoDrive PCIe SSD, dubbed ‘Hybrid’. As the name no doubt gives away, the product sees a hard drive paired with an SSD, in order to have them act together and give users the best of both worlds – speed and storage. This is an idea that has been tried a countless number of times before, but to this day no solution has truly seemed to take off.

OCZ hopes to see that change with its Hybrid, though, which pairs a mind-bogglingly fast SSD with a traditional hard drive and then piles on smart software on top of it. At its launch, the RevoDrive Hybrid will become available in a single flavor; 1TB. That’s comprised of a 1TB mechanical hard drive (vendor is not mentioned, though it’s rated for 5400 RPM) and a 100GB RevoDrive that offers a sequential read speeds of 910MB/s, sequential writes of 810MB/s, sequential write IOPS of 65,000 and random writes of 120,000 IOPS.

The magic is accomplished with the help of Dataplex caching software that keeps track of your usage and decides which files should be kept on the SSD, and which files are safe to remain on the hard drive. You could expect things like Windows and your common applications to be mostly run off of an SSD, while lesser-important files related to your games, music, documents and so forth are kept on the hard drive.

None of the mechanics at play here are new, and in fact Seagate touted the same thing with its Momentus XT drives, and Intel with its Smart Reponse Technology. But that’s not to say things can’t be improved on algorithm-wise. Past that, with the fact that OCZ’s solution includes a 100GB SSD, the entire setup might actually feel like a 1TB, because 100GB is a huge amount of space that can be used for caching.

The RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB, expected to hit retail soon, will retail for $499.99. As the RevoDrive 3 120GB retails for about $400, there’s virtually no premium on the Hybrid, which also has its software license included in the price. This is the first hybrid solution I’ve actually been excited for, so I hope it manages to live up to all the hype – something no other hybrid solution has really managed to do.