OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 480GB
OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 480GB
Benchmark Results
CZ has been on a tear as of late, bringing new SSD technologies to market targeted for all types of end users, as well as enterprise customers. The company was one of the first suppliers to market with a PCI-E-based offering that was priced low enough to be at least approachable for the average power user or workstation professional. The RevoDrive 3 X2 is OCZ’s latest incarnation of their consumer-grade PCI-E SSD line of products that was introduced last year. The first-generation product employed SandForce SF-1200 series 3Gbps SATA controllers along with a Silicon Image RAID controller and a PCI-X to PCI-E bridge. More elegantly, the RevoDrive 3 makes use of a proprietary RAID controller (ARM-based), which OCZ has dubbed the SuperScale storage processor, that has both PCI-E and 6Gbps SATA interfaces on board and connect to SandForce’s latest SF-2200 series 6Gbps SATA SSD controllers. With four of these controllers on the RevoDrive 3 X2, as you can imagine, performance is at drag race speeds. The RevoDrive 3 X2, with its mezzaninestyle, stacked-PCB design, boasts insane 1,500MBps max read and 1,250MBps max write specifications. OCZ achieves this performance in part due to technology the company calls VCA (Virtualized Controller Architecture) 2.0. Through a combination of load balancing algorithms and CCQS (Complex Command Queuing Structure) that employs both Native and Tagged Command Queuing, OCZ’s SuperScale
512K Write
527.9
4K Read
21.13
4K Write
94.06
4K QD32 Read
385.8
4K QD32 Write PCMark Vantage HDD*
512.4
Windows Photo Gallery
486.73
Windows Defender
349.88
O
22 September 2011
/ www.computerpoweruser.com
CrystalDiskMark*
processor on the RevoDrive 3 X2 maximizes resource utilization and performance across the card’s array of SandForce SSD controllers. Not only that, the RevoDrive 3 X2 can support both TRIM commands and SMART monitoring, which is a first for a single-card SSD RAID product. Another feature that has been added to the RevoDrive 3 lineup in general is power fail protection and sleep state support. This was one of the few reservations we had with the first-gen RevoDrive product. Though our RevoDrive 3 X2 prototype didn’t quite have this feature working yet, we’re told retail cards will have the ability to drop into system standby and then recover via onboard non-volatile memory that is in place to support delayed transactions. Regardless, what will attract speed freaks and workstation professionals will be the RevoDrive 3 X2’s performance. Hands down it’s one of the fastest PCI-E SSDs on the market right now and easily the most reasonably priced when you consider several-thousand-dollar alternatives from Fusion-io, LSI, and others. At $1,699, the 480GB X2 card we tested weighs in at a little over $3.5/GB, which isn’t bad if you consider the RevoDrive 3 X2 is currently almost three times as fast as the average 6Gbps SATA SSD. ■ BY
RevoDrive 3 X2 480GB $1,699.99 OCZ www.ocztechnology.com
DAVE ALTAVILLA
Sequential Read
685.5
Sequential Write
544.5
512K Read
560.5
Vista Startup
508.6
Gaming
329.95
Windows Media Center
625.23
Windows Movie Maker
297.64
Application Loading
465.7
Media Player ATTO Disk Benchmark*
270.52
4K Transfer Read
310,419
4K Transfer Write
232,046
32K Transfer Read
1,063,976
32K Transfer Write
955,908
512K Transfer Read
1,118,481
512K Transfer Write
1,398,795
1MB Transfer Read
1,161,499
1MB Transfer Write
1,412,818
8MB Transfer Read
1,214,350
8MB Transfer Write
1,402,750
IOMeter 2010 Workstation - QD 144
78,092 IOPS
Database - QD 144
91,150 IOPS
4K Writes, Random - QD 128
140,083 IOPS
*results in MBps Specs: Maximum read/write (advertised): 1,500MBps/1,250MBps; Maximum 4KB write (advertised): 230,000 IOPS; Interface: PCI-E 2.0 x4; MTBF: 1,000 hours; Three-year warranty Test system specs: Processor: Core i7-970 CPU; Motherboard: Gigabyte EX58 Extreme; GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 285; RAM: 6GB Kingston DDR3-1333; Storage: WD Caviar Black 1TB; Windows 7 Ultimate x64