OCZ Unveils Ultra-Fast Consumer PCI-E SSD, “RevoDrive”

At a meeting I had with OCZ during this month’s Computex event, a product sat on display that really grabbed my attention. So much so, that I ended up referring to it a countless number of times before the event even wrapped up. I’m of course talking about the RevoDrive, which is the first consumer-oriented solid-state disk which uses the PCI-Express bus for its operation, in lieu of a SATA port.

Add-in card-based storage isn’t entirely new, but today’s technology blows away anything we’ve ever seen  in the past. This is especially true where PCI-E based SSD’s are concerned. Even with the latest SATA spec at 6Gbit/s, some SSD’s are able to push its upper limit, so it’s for that reason that PCI-E cards are a very natural direction to head, thanks to the enormous amount of  bandwidth that the bus offers.

Pricing has been a problem for SSD’s for as long as they’ve existed, and that problem is amplified even further when talking about PCI-E models. OCZ’s Z-Drive models, also based on PCI-E, offer superb speeds and densities, but as the drives start out at around the $1,000 mark, they’re well outside the price-range for many. That’s the reason I found so much potential in the RevoDrive. The promise was that speeds would be almost doubled, but the pricing increase almost not even be noticeable.

Initial RevoDrive models are sporting read speeds of 540 MB/s and write speeds of 480 MB/s, which as mentioned are near double the performance of OCZ’s flagship Vertex 2, which is rated for 285 MB/s and 275 MB/s, respectively. Likewise, the RevoDrive also bumps the IOPS up to 75K, from 50K, so all-in-all, it looks to be the ultimate boot/OS drive for the hardcore enthusiast.

Being that the RevoDrive is made super-fast with the help of a RAID solution, there is no TRIM support here. At the same time, the drive also lacks idle garbage collection schemes, which is a bit puzzling. It’s been rumored that OCZ is hard at work on its own TRIM-like tool for its PCI-E SSD’s, so we can hope that we’ll see that come to fruition sooner than later, as the lack of TRIM is going to be one reason some might hold off on a purchase – at least for the time-being.

Despite that, I admit that the lack of TRIM doesn’t do much to dampen my spirits, because the fact of the matter is, the RevoDrive is fast, and under regular usage, speed degradation shouldn’t become a real issue too quickly. Even at its worst, the RevoDrive should still be faster than the fastest 2.5″ model available. Then there’s of course the fact that the RevoDrive is set to offer speeds that most people won’t even be able to appreciate. It sure doesn’t hurt to have them there, though!

I am not quite certain when the drive is set to hit retail, but it shouldn’t be long from this point. I’m thinking two or three weeks, but it might even be sooner. The 120GB model is set with an MSRP of $389.99, while the 240GB model sits at an even lower $/GB at $699.99. At these prices, the premium over the Vertex 2 is about $30, which given the performance boost, is hard to complain about.

Moving beyond the bottleneck of SATA II, the RevoDrive features a PCI-E interface to deliver superior speeds up to 540MB/s reads and random 4k writes up to 75,000 IOPS. Designed for high-performance gaming PCs and workstations, the RevoDrive has the unique capability to run both Windows and your essential applications and games to not only provides a more responsive PC experience, but promote a cooler, quieter, and more energy efficient conditions compared to traditional mechanical hard drives.