Fragmentation over time and TRIM
Fragmentation Over Time:

Due to the SiImage chip not playing nicely with HDTach, I had to resort to HDTune to evaluate performance after the Revo was tortured by our battery of benches:

Clean:
OCZ RevoDrive 240GB PCIe SSD Full Performance Review - Storage 44

After testing/fragmentation:
OCZ RevoDrive 240GB PCIe SSD Full Performance Review - Storage 45

As an interesting data point, here’s the ioXtreme Pro‘s results:

Clean:
OCZ RevoDrive 240GB PCIe SSD Full Performance Review - Storage 46

After testing:
OCZ RevoDrive 240GB PCIe SSD Full Performance Review - Storage 47

After single pass write (previous benchmark pass):
OCZ RevoDrive 240GB PCIe SSD Full Performance Review - Storage 48

…and now the ioDrive 160:

Clean:
OCZ RevoDrive 240GB PCIe SSD Full Performance Review - Storage 49 

After testing:
OCZ RevoDrive 240GB PCIe SSD Full Performance Review - Storage 50 

After single pass write (previous benchmark pass):
OCZ RevoDrive 240GB PCIe SSD Full Performance Review - Storage 51 

TRIM:
 
RevoDrive does not support TRIM as the on-board SiImage RAID controller is incapable of passing those commands onto the SandForce controllers.  The big advantage of SandForce controlled flash is its excellent handling of fragmentation.  Without TRIM at play, these chips can still maintain full write speeds after the most challenging write patterns have taken place.

ioDrive’s do not yet appear to support TRIM, but it would be an easy addition through an update to the firmware and/or driver.  After seeing that they do in fact fragment (and take a fairly large percentage hit on write speeds in the process), hopefully this addition comes sooner than later.

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