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| Review: OCZ RevoDrive 50Gb SSD PCI-Express Card |
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| Posted by Will Smith | |
| Thursday, 09 September 2010 23:03 | |
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Page 8 of 8
Verdict and Conclusion Looking at the results from our tests, I have to say the performance of the OCZ RevoDrive SSD card is truely phenomenal. I've never seen anything quite like it. It outperformed every single SSDs we've tested so far in our labs, both in terms of read and write speeds. Using the Everest disk test, we managed to get a average read speed of 497.7 Mb/sec, which is more than double your average SSD. Write speed was also excellent, with an average reading of 401.3 Mb/sec. Again, it's literally twice the performance of your average SSD. You're probably asking how is that possible? ... Well, the answer is quite simple. You see, the OCZ RevoDrive 50Gb SSD PCI-Express Card is basically 2 x 23Gb solid state drives on a single PCB configured in RAID 0 format, this in effect gives you a total of 46Gb. The RAID 0 configuration enables the drives to run data "striping", which allows a massive boost in performance. Incidently, this type of configuration can also be done on two separate SSDs with a separate SATA RAID controller ... but what OCZ has done is to combine all of these separate components, and put them into one single PCB card that slots into the faster x16 PCI-Express 2.0 slot (and not the slower standard PCI slot). What is also great about this ... is that there's no need for SATA and power cables, which means you can now reduce the amount of loose cabling within your system.
Powered by 2 x SandForce SSD controllers, as well as a Silicon Image Sil 3124 RAID controller, there's no doubt that the OCZ RevoDrive SSD card is currently one of the fastest SSD devices on the market. No other manufacturer I know off has anything like it for the consumer level. If you're after an internal SSD card that offers top class performance, then there's only one answer. A few niggly bits ... I was a little dumbstruck to find that there was no driver CD or disk included. You have to annoyingly go to OCZ's website to download it. The Silcon Image Sil 3124 drivers are needed for Windows installation, if you want to use it as the main boot drive. The other thing I forgot to mention, and you probably already know ... is that the OCZ RevoDrive SSD card is not really portable. Meaning once you install it into your system, it's permanently fixed ... you can just remove it like an ordinary SSD, which I sometime do for data transfer between different systems.
With such an increase in performance, you can expect a price premium to go with it. The version we tested only has a capacity of 50Gb (46Gb usuable) and costs around USD $280.00, which I think is fairly pricey. To be honest, a capacity of 50Gb isn't really good enough for today's storage demands or daily operations, however it maybe ok as a boot drive. A more usable size would be a higher capacity of 120Gb, but this will cost you over USD $380.00. To give you a price comparison, you can probably get a standard 500Gb SATA hard drive for around USD $39.00 ... so is the price of the OCZ RevoDrive SSD card, really worth paying for? I'll let you decide.
Final words. In terms of raw performance, the OCZ RevoDrive SSD PCI-Express is one beast of a card. It offers phenomenal read and write performance, and currently beats everything out there on the market. However having said that, I feel the price can be improved a little. For some users, 50Gb capacity may not be enough ... so if you've got the cash, I would suggest you go for the 120Gb version.
SCORE
"Extreme Performance"
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