Internals, Testing Methodology and System Setup
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:
From top / left: OCZ RevoDrive x2, Viking SATADIMM, FusionIO ioDrive 160, Samsung PB22-J, Samsung 470
The original RevoDrive used a pair of 120GB SandForce units. The x2 halves the flash to each controller,
but doubles the controller count, adding up to the same 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.
RevoDrive on our storage testbed shows the LED’s in action. They are a bit bright and their blinking may be an annoyance to those with windowed cases. They are easily covered with a piece of black electrical tape if needed.
Testing Methods
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.
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
