OCZ's RevoDrive Preview: An Affordable PCIe SSD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 25, 2010 2:15 AM ESTNo TRIM, No Idle Garbage Collection
Unlike the OCZ Z-Drive, the RevoDrive has no idle time garbage collection support. There’s obviously no TRIM support given that the drive runs in an internal RAID, however OCZ is apparently working on a TRIM tool for both the Revo and Z-Drives. There’s absolutely no word on when we might see such a thing, so at this point you’d much have to treat the RevoDrive as not support any sort of TRIM. The only hope you have for keeping performance high is the usual garbage collection that happens whenever you write to the drive.
Thankfully the SandForce controllers are extremely resilient and generally don’t really drop in performance with normal desktop usage. I can however get the drive’s performance to drop if I torture the thing for a while:
Write speed drops in the worst case scenario to just under 200MB/s. That’s by no means terrible, but it does bring the drive closer to the performance of a single Vertex 2 SSD. Do I believe that through normal use your drive would ever end up in this state? No, but it is definitely possible for performance to drop over time depending on the workload as I’ve explained time and time again. It’s just far less likely on something SandForce based. This is also not just limited to the RevoDrive. You’d run into the same problem with a pair of Vertex 2s in RAID-0.
The hope here is that OCZ will be able to deliver some sort of a manual TRIM tool in the future. It’s been several months since the Z-Drive’s release and we haven’t seen any mention of TRIM there, so I wouldn’t count on a quick introduction. I’m hearing we could see something in a matter of weeks but I’m not sure about that.
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orangpelupa - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
"It'll offer up to twice the performance of a Vertex 2 SSD for only $20 more when it ships in July."lol i read that wrong.
and though the SSD only priced @ $20 >_<
HollyDOL - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
Nice reading, thanks for another SSD review.btw, on Installation and Early Issues you have a typo:
I headed into the Silicon Image BIOS, asked to recreate the array, specified the entire 233GB
should be 223GB ;-)
Rajinder Gill - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
Thanks for point that out, it's fixed.-Raja
TonyB - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
would have been nice to see this thing saturate the PCIe 4x bus on sequentials (1GB/s?). but alas we get a hardly faster if not equal device similar to the Crucial C300 on a sata3 channel.i'll pass thanks.
Phate-13 - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
Recently encountered a very interesting ssd, seems like crucial launched a new ssd, 64GB version. And at $150, it's a bargain for it's performance. It's not only cheaper then an Intel Postville per Gigabyte, it's also seems to be faster.http://www.crucial.com/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODUL...
(Didn't know where else to put this tip.)
therealnickdanger - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
Wow, that is fantastic! I guess I never even thought to look for a smaller C300 model, but 64GB is really all that I need. @ $150, that's clearly the BEST deal around! Two of those in RAID-0 is $300 and would destroy the Revo or Z!vol7ron - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
You must not read any articles here.In order of occurrence (later to newer):
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2909
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2974/crucial-s-reals...
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3694/crucial-release...
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3704/crucial-realssd...
Phate-13 - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
You must only read the titles of the articles here.1. The 64GB version is new, and a lot cheaper then the 128GB version. The 128GB costs more then double that of the 64GB.
2. If your not trying to point out that it is not new, but the fact that there are problems with it, read the last article:
"The update should go live while I'm out of the country, but it looks like by the end of this month things should finally (hopefully?) be safe for C300 owners. "
It's been two months, so things should be ok by now.
So if you got some information about CURRENT affairs, that would be appreciated, and for the rest, that is interesting reading material for people who are interested in the ssd indeed, but for the rest, I know that already. The only thing I'm interested in right now if there still are those problems.
Qapa - Saturday, June 26, 2010 - link
Hi Anand,Can you give us an update indicating if everything is working fine by now or if there are still problems?
Of course, more problems can appear later on but just to know if, for now, it seems to be ok...
Thanks,
Qapa
Trisagion - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
Can anybody please tell me the <b><i>name</i></b> of that connector above the SI chip? I know it's an expansion slot for a daughter board, but what is it called? It's driving me crazy!