OCZ RevoDrive 240GB PCIe SSD Full Performance Review

Internals:

As this is a bare board, we have nothing but internals to show from the start.  Here are some detail shots of the various portions of the board:

RevoDrive front.

The rear was bare save another lead attached after production. Remember this is semi-final hardware.

A pair of SandForce 1200 controllers with the recent firmware open up their flash banks to 120GB each, totaling 240GB of available capacity.

Close-up of the SandForce.

The status LED area tips us off to the fact that the SiImage controller is capable of driving 4 SandForce controllers.  Look for this in possible future configurations of the RevoDrive.

RevoDrive on our storage testbed shows the LED’s in action.

Our tests are a good mix of synthetic and real-world benchmarks.  PCMark, IOMeter, HDTach, HDTune, Yapt and our custom File Copy test round out the selection to cover just about all bases.  If you have any questions about our tests just drop into the Storage Forum and we’ll help you out!

Specific To This Review

It should be noted that an ioXtreme (non-pro) performs identically to an ioXtreme Pro.  The difference between the two is that at least one Pro is required when soft-bonding multiple ioXtreme models together as a means to increase performance and overall throughput.  For that reason, only the ioXtreme Pro results will be included given the ioXtreme (non-pro) yields the same results.

Test System Setup   

We have switched our testbed over to a more dedicated, forward thinking machine.  We made some changes to help minimize test data scatter with higher bandwidth devices.  Sound is flat out disabled, with no additional card installed.  Video was *intentionally* shifted to a PCI unit to free up both PCIe-16 slots for testing tandem pairs of PCI Express cards (like ioDrives, DDRDrives, and high end RAID cards).  Spot checks against the previous rig showed a negligible change in test output.   

PC Perspective would like to thank ASUS, Corsair, and BFG for supplying some of the components of our test rig.   

Hard Drive Test System Setup
CPU	Intel Core i7 920 @ 4 GHZ (HT disabled)
Motherboard	Asus P6T
Memory	Corsair Dominator 6GB DDR3-1600
Hard Drive	G.Skill 32GB SLC SSD
Sound Card	N/A
Video Card	BFG Geforce 8400 GS 512MB PCI
Video Drivers	Geforce 181.22
Power Supply	Corsair CMPSU-650TX
DirectX Version	DX9.0c
Operating System	Windows XP X64 SP2  Windows 7 X64 (for TRIM testing)

• PCMark05
• Yapt
• IOMeter
• HDTach
• HDTune   
  
• PCPer File Copy Test