A Closer Look: Chips and ICs
There’re the other twelve chips to make sixteen in total. Each chip is 8GB of 25nm Micron flash. Here’s one of the flash chips up close and personal.
If you do the math sixteen chips of eight gigabytes is 128GB, Sandforce controllers like to have a spare chip to use to replace damaged cells as well as to use for caching purposes and to spread the data out for faster access.
Speaking of the Sandforce controllers, here’s a closeup:
There are two Sandforce SF-2281 controllers, each of them manages eight flash chips.
The two Sandforce controllers are in turn controlled by this character I found hiding under the heatsink:
This is an in-house designed proprietary OCZ controller, I was unable to find any detailed information about what makes it tick. It speaks SATA6 and SAS and talks to the two SF-2281 controllers via SATA6, caches and organizes read/write requests internally (as well as managing TRIM, SMART and SCSI commands), and then communicates with the rest of the computer via PCIe.
Power for the RevoDrive comes from the PCIe slot and is monitored by a POWR1014 power monitor and controller.
Also involved in power is this EN6360QI buck regulator with a maximum output of eight amps.
Installation is quite simple, the only part that is slightly complicated as choosing which PCIe slot to use if you have a motherboard that has multiple options.
The RevoDrive3 is bootable, which is a nice plus. To install windows 7 on it you will need to download the drivers and put them on a CD/DVD or USB drive, otherwise windows will not be able to see the drive. Other than that you don’t have to do anything special to install Windows 7 on the drive. I’m going to skip ahead slightly and say that you’ll be shocked by how fast windows loads when you boot off this thing. It’s staggering.
