OCZ Technology Revo Drive 3 X2 Series 480 GB PCI Express 8 GB-s Slim - RVD3X2-FHPX4-480G

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Price: $1,075.04    

Product Feature

• NAND Flash Components: Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND Flash Memory, Interface: PCI-Express, Form Factor: PCIe Full Height
• Life Expectancy: 1 million hours Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF), ECC Recovery: Up to 55 bytes correctable per 512-byte sector
• Max Read: up to 1500 MB/s,
• Max Write: up to 1250 MB/s, 4KB Random Write: I/O Per Second (IOPS): 110,000 IOPS,4KB Random Read: I/O Per Second (IOPS): 130,000 IOPS

Product Description

The OCZ RevoDrive 3X2 PCI-Express Solid State Drive Series was designed with power users and multimedia designers in mind and gives enthusiasts the cutting-edge storage they crave. Eliminating the SATA bottleneck, the PCIe-based Revo 3X2 delivers ground-breaking 1.5GB/s of bandwidth and 230,0004 KB random write IOPS making this an ideal SSD for high performance applications, multimedia, and workstations. Along with unprecedented performance, the Revo 3X2 features OCZ's proprietary Virtualized Controller Architecture (VCA) 2.0 which provides features including TRIM support and SMART data monitoring, something previously unheard of with PCIe solutions. In addition, the Revo 3X2's Super Scale storage accelerator enables scalable SSD performance and significantly reduces the host CPU burden inherent to competing PCIe storagefferings. The Revo Drive 3X2 series is a premium feature rich storage solution that delivers superior performance and reliability through innovative design.

OCZ Technology Revo Drive 3 X2 Series 480 GB PCI Express 8 GB-s Slim - RVD3X2-FHPX4-480G Review

This drive is excellent -- but ignore the reviews that refer to the hypothetical 1,500MB/sec numbers. It's really a 700MB/sec drive (which is why I subtracted 3 stars).

OCZ advertises this drive as having a 1,500MB/sec read speed, using the ATTO benchmarking tool (ATTO lists OCZ as one of their partners). The problem is that the 1,500MB/sec number comes from reading/writing files with all zeroes. Since the RevoDrive compresses data, the more compressible the data, the higher numbers you'll see -- and a file of all zeroes is the most compressible data possible (WinZIP compresses those files over 99.9%). Even a 20 year old hard drive could easily achieve 1,500MB/sec (or even 15,000MB/sec) if it used compression.

So with compression, test results using all zeroes are meaningless. It's no different than a hard drive manufacturer stating that their hard drive is 10TB, when in reality it is a 1TB hard drive that compresses files. The actual number depends on the type of data you have.

Like everyone else, I did get 1,500MB/sec reads using ATTO. Since the ATTO benchmarking tool defaults to all zeroes, however, that number is meaningless. Fortunately, ATTO can be set up to use random data (you need to choose "I/O Comparison" to access the "Test Pattern" options, and choose "Random"). Guess what? The same benchmarking tool that OCZ uses to advertise 1,500MB/sec confirms that this is really a ~700MB/sec read drive!

Worse, OCZ claims that the ~700MB/sec performance review sites show is due to mysterious "queue depth." But with ATTO benchmarking it at 1,500MB/sec using all zeroes and 700MB/sec using random data, there is now proof that the 700MB numbers are the real-life numbers, and queue depth isn't a factor for performance.

FWIW, I wrote a program to test the speeds of loading various files (using the Windows LoadFile() function to load the entire file into memory in one call). MP3's read at about 800MB/sec, MPGs at 700MB/sec, and the \windows\system32\ directory files at about 850MB/sec (1MB or greater files). I did see over 1,400MB/sec on a few text-based .csv files with all capital letters.

Also noteworthy is that the speed varies a lot even for a single file. With my old Intel X25 SSD, read speeds usually would not vary more than 1% for a given file that was read multiple times. With the RevoDrive, reading the same file multiple times often will result in 5%-20% differences in speed.

I should also mention that OCZ was willing to stand by their warranty (the one that came with my drive guaranteed for 3 years that the performance would meet published specs, which they admitted was impossible for the data I have, so OCZ is refunding my purchase price).

One last thing -- since Windows does not support TRIM for SCSI drivers, it is recommended that you leave 10%-15% of the drive space free.

Overall, I have no problems with the drive itself, and would have been very pleased with it had I bought it on the assumption it was a 700+MB/sec drive. But when paying a high premium for performance, if they say it is a 1,500MB/sec drive, I expect there to be *some* way to load my data at 1,500MB/sec (whether it is a tweak, upgraded drivers, even more RAM or a new motherboard). But no computer using a RevoDrive 3 X2 can load my data at 1,500MB/sec.

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