OCZ’s Revo Brings Affordable PCI-E SSD’s to Enthusiasts

If you’ve read Robert’s review of OCZ’s Vertex 2, you know that it’s one of the fastest drives ever produced, and unlike Crucial’s C300, it seems to be devoid of game-breaking issues. At 285MB/s read and 275MB/s write, along with a 4K random write performance of 50,000 IOPS, the drive is lacking little. But who isn’t interested in going even faster?

That’s where PCI-E based SSDs have come into play, with solutions from companies like Fusion-io and of course OCZ itself, with its Z-Drive line-up. Up to this point, regular consumers have been let out in the cold, waiting for a time when such drives are actually within their grasp. Well soon, that’s going to be a reality, with OCZ’s Revo.

Like the Vertex 2, the Revo drive utilizes SandForce’s SF-1200 controller, so even by that alone we could expect huge speeds. But here, two are combined for RAID purposes to deliver us speeds of 540MB/s read and 530 MB/s write, along with 75,000 IOPS (4k random write). The best part? Believe it or not, this solution is set to cost about $50 – $60 more than an equal-density Vertex 2.

Now, I’m not sure if it’s that obvious or not, but that’s awesome. We’re talking a surplus of 500MB/s speeds for both read and write, on a drive that should retail at around $400 – $450 for a 100GB model (likely 120GB at launch due to firmware updates).  And yes, it’s very bootable, so you’ll be able to install your OS on it and enjoy some rather insane speeds.

The Revo drive should be available within the next two months, and final specs might be changed depending on whether further firmware tweaks improve things further. I can’t wait to see this both hit the market and our labs!