Verdict and Conclusion
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I was very excited when I heard OCZ was sending me this RevoDrive3, I had an opportunity to work with a first generation RevoDrive and was quite impressed. As such it was interesting to see how far the platform has come since then.
It has come a long way! This drive beats the first generation’s X2 drive, equals or beats the second generation’s X2 drive, and this is only a X1! I can only imagine what the RevoDrive3 X2 is like.
The RevoDrive3 is not without it’s down sides, the primary downside in my book is a lack of drivers for anything but Windows 7. If you run XP, Vista, Linux, Unix, OSX, or anything other than Windows 7 you will not be able to use the drive.
The second down side is that on a per-GB basis it is quite expensive, roughly twice the price of top notch SATA6 drives of the same capacity.
Of course, it is also at least twice as fast as those drives, and substantially more than twice as fast with deep disk access queues.
The speed of the RevoDrive3 120GB is absolutely astounding, I was blown away but the performance loading windows and loading programs. My jaw quite literally dropped when I saw the performance numbers in ATTO with queue depth of 10.
The low queue depth performance numbers aren’t as fast, but if you think about drive access from a practical standpoint it’s the large depth numbers that matter. If you’re saving a single small file it will save almost instantly even if the performance numbers are “only” at the low queue depth RevoDrive3 numbers. If you’re saving a single large file the RevoDrive3 blasts through it at close to a gigabyte per second. If you’re saving a bunch of small files you have a queue and the RevoDrive3 blasts through it.
Installing the drive is easy, slap it into a PCIe slot and you’re done hardware wise. Just don’t forget to download the drivers before you start installing windows, as even Windows 7 requires external drivers to use the drive.
You’ll want to check your motherboard’s PCIe slot mapping, using some slots on some motherboards will drop the primary slot to x8 mode. If you have a modern top end GPU installed running it in x8 mode will cost you a 1-4% performance, not bad but nice to avoid if possible.
As a boot drive the RevoDrive3 is rather amusing to watch, the Windows 7 logo doesn’t even have time to congeal into a single unit (or anything close to it!) before the logo disappears and the fully functional desktop appears. I expect the CPU is the slowest part of booting, really.
To summarize into nice bullet points, there are pros:
- Really, really, really fast.
- Bootable, windows loads NOW when installed on it.
- Really obscenely fast, it gives RAID performance without the risk and lack of TRIM.
As with everything I have ever found in this existance, there are cons too:
- Obscene performance does not come cheap.
- No drivers for anything other than Windows 7.
- Using the second PCIe slot will drop the first (and your GPU) to x8 mode on some motherboards.
All told I am very impressed by the RevoDrive3, watching windows load from it makes my giggle every time. My only real issue with it is the lack of drivers for Linux, I like to use both Windows 7 and Linux. The lack of Linux drivers makes the drive less useful for me, and could be an issue for business as well. In the final rating that lack of drivers hurts, but even with that issue the drive gets a very solid 8.7/10 rating. If you need a drive with absolutely blazing large file and/or large queue performance, it’s hard to beat a RevoDrive3
SCORE
8.7/10
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