[TSullivan]

When it comes to desktop-based high-performance storage, to get to the bleeding edge there are certain limits you have to work around. A single SATA SSD, no matter how fast it is, will be held back by the 6.0Gb/s bandwidth. To get around this many opt for the PCIe interface, either by using a RAID card with multiple drives grouped together or a PCIe integral storage solution. Today we look at the latter option with the latest in OCZ's RevoDrive family of enthusiast SSDs, the RevoDrive 3 X2. Incorporating four SandForce SF-2281 processors and 480GB of tier one NAND flash; the OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 drives read speed up to 1500MB/s and writes of 1250MB/s and 4K random write IOPS of 200,000.

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[Telstar The Sorcerer]

TSullivan, on 28 June 2011 - 11:00 AM, said:

When it comes to desktop-based high-performance storage, to get to the bleeding edge there are certain limits you have to work around. A single SATA SSD, no matter how fast it is, will be held back by the 6.0Gb/s bandwidth. To get around this many opt for the PCIe interface, either by using a RAID card with multiple drives grouped together or a PCIe integral storage solution. Today we look at the latter option with the latest in OCZ's RevoDrive family of enthusiast SSDs, the RevoDrive 3 X2. Incorporating four SandForce SF-2281 processors and 480GB of tier one NAND flash; the OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 drives read speed up to 1500MB/s and writes of 1250MB/s and 4K random write IOPS of 200,000.

Read Full Review

Nice review!
But why they didnt do a 120gb version? The entry price to be paid is way too high for this new gen.

BTW, when do you plan to test the Crucial M4?

[spammeister]

Excellent! Did you much testing as a boot drive? As this would be the product to finally combine and replace my 300GB VRaptor and 4 SSD raid setup.

I've never quite trusted the Revo products as boot drives, even though I think they are the solution to finally upgrading. Nice to see that OCZ is refreshing the line at a crazy pace. Hopefully it will be a tad cheaper and have good availability by X-mas

This post has been edited by spammeister: 29 June 2011 - 08:21 AM

[Telstar The Sorcerer]

Having used scsi raid controllers for awhile now, the issues of bootable pci-e SSDs are very similar.
It can be a real PITA at times, and the list of supported motherboards is pretty small.

[TSullivan]

spammeister, on 29 June 2011 - 08:20 AM, said:

Excellent! Did you much testing as a boot drive? As this would be the product to finally combine and replace my 300GB VRaptor and 4 SSD raid setup.

I've never quite trusted the Revo products as boot drives, even though I think they are the solution to finally upgrading. Nice to see that OCZ is refreshing the line at a crazy pace. Hopefully it will be a tad cheaper and have good availability by X-mas

Actually we did play around with booting from it. Bootable Acronis didn't work for cloning off the bat (didnt have the drivers to load), but initiating the process from inside Windows worked perfectly. And since we had installed the drivers to run it as a secondary drive, they were already loaded after the clone finished. No hiccups at all as a boot drive on our system. When I get into the office today I will post some of the PCMark07 results (Intel SSD 510 boot drive vs Revo3 X2 boot drive).

We had to cut short some of our testing for this review because towards the end the drive became unresponsive and ended up failing. One of the downsides of testing such early hardware is there is a risk something can go wrong. We already have a replacement model on the way though and will be updating the review. I have a sneaking suspicion that our model may have not been running on all cylinders in our tests.

[TSullivan]

Telstar The Sorcerer, on 29 June 2011 - 03:53 AM, said:

Nice review!
But why they didnt do a 120gb version? The entry price to be paid is way too high for this new gen.

BTW, when do you plan to test the Crucial M4?

Well they have a 120GB version in the non-X2 model. I am guessing having a RAID0 of 4 30GB drives wasnt worth it for them.

Also our Crucial M4 review has been up for a while http://www.storagere...sd_review_256gb

[Telstar The Sorcerer]

TSullivan, on 29 June 2011 - 09:52 AM, said:

Well they have a 120GB version in the non-X2 model. I am guessing having a RAID0 of 4 30GB drives wasnt worth it for them.

They have 100GB X2 non rev3, have had it for a while, and is on my whishlist... but real-world differences do not seem to justify the hassle of installing windows on it. The rev3 X2 instead has a performance gap that could be worth my time
Well, i posted on ocz forums that i want a 120gb version, but i doubt they'll do it.
I prefer to have physically separate discs/arrays for OS and programs/documents, so it is not just a budget issue.

Quote

Also our Crucial M4 review has been up for a while http://www.storagere...sd_review_256gb

I have missed it: going to check. The M4 and 510 are in my list as well and seem the most bugfree of the current crop.

[Telstar The Sorcerer]

TSullivan, on 29 June 2011 - 09:52 AM, said:

Also our Crucial M4 review has been up for a while http://www.storagere...sd_review_256gb

Ah its the 256gb version, that's why i didnt read it. Performance is VERY different at the 120gb size esp for the M4 and vertex3.

[Brian]

Telstar The Sorcerer, on 29 June 2011 - 10:44 AM, said:

Ah its the 256gb version, that's why i didnt read it. Performance is VERY different at the 120gb size esp for the M4 and vertex3.

You're right...with those Marvell controllers, the performance drops. We're off topic now, but we are trying to get the rest of the m4 sizes in for review. If you want to discuss further, get a new thread going in the SSD forum.

[[ETA]MrSpadge]

It would be nice to use the 4 controllers for added redundancy. Offer higher RAID modes for them. If any of them failes, be able to use the remaining ones. If entire flash dies fail, don't use them (tricky beyond 1 reserve chip, I guess).

Regarding a 120 GB X2: they'd need 4 GB dies for that, which are not available (or not being bought?) at 25 nm. They could do it with 30+ nm, but they'd cost more. Anyway, an X2 is probably total overkill for desktop use anyway. The SR real world tests do show an advantage for the X2, but even they replay recorded accesses faster than they would occur in the real world, seperating the boys from the men but creating a not-totally-realistic scenario (correct me, if I'm wrong here Brian).

MrS