Legit Storage Reviews
OCZ RevoDrive 120GB PCI-Express SSD Review
| Manufacturer: | OCZ Technology |
| Product: | OCZSSDPX-1RVD0120 |
| Date: | Wed, Jul 28, 2010 - 12:00 AM |
| Written By: | Joe Evans - |
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OCZ RevoDrive - Closer Look
I have to say the first thing I thought of when I pulled the OCZ RevoDrive out of the box is how nice it was not to have to void a warranty by cracking open the case. No screws or loose parts to deal with is nice although that's not something Joe Consumer needs to worry about. That said, I wouldn't be surprised to see later iterations of the drive a little more covered up to prevent accidental damage caused by stray static shocks or incidental contact with other components during installation. I personally like the naked card because it maintains a lower profile (read as: better air flow) and less weight.
On the "back" of the drive resides four rows of four NAND chips and, combined with the 16 chips on the front, give us our 120GB total drive capacity.
The NAND is branded as Intel 29F32G08AAMDB 34nm MLC NAND, which we've seen before on several drives.
Behind the fancy "R" logo near the center of the card is the actual SiI3124 Silicon Image RAID controller which is a "single-chip PCI or PCI-X to 4-port Serial ATA (SATA) host controller". This allows the RevoDrive to act as a SATA boot drive with the help of the Pericom PI7C9X130 PCI-E-to-PCI-X reversible bridge chip found near the bottom PCI-E pin contacts. Using this configuration allows OCZ to make the RevoDrive very cost competitive.
Although there are only two Sandforce controllers on this drive, the RAID controller can actually handle up to four which leaves room for some interesting next generation RevoDrives. There is even a dedicated space for a connector in the dead center of the card. This should conjure up visions of dual cards in the heads of enthusiasts.
The twin Sandforce SF-1222 (a.k.a. SF-1200) controllers sit mere inches apart, vertically stacked when the drive is oriented with the PCI-E connectors at the bottom.
Not much to say about the controllers themselves as they are used on a pretty wide variety of drives now and we've seen how well they perform. Again, even though the controllers do support TRIM and idle garbage collection, these are not available on the RevoDrive as they sit behind a RAID controller. If you are still on Windows XP (we know there are a lot diehard XP users out there!), you aren't getting the benefits of OS TRIM anyway.
At the bracket end of the card lies a row of blue LED's which provide indicator status (not that most will be able to see them while installed). Note that it references four SATA ports which we mentioned before is what the RAID controller is capable of supporting.
Next Page - OCZ RevoDrive - Drivers, RAID & Boot
| Review Index |
|
Page 1 - OCZ RevoDrive - Introduction
Page 2 - OCZ RevoDrive - Closer Look Page 3 - OCZ RevoDrive - Drivers, RAID & Boot Page 4 - OCZ RevoDrive - Test System Page 5 - ATTO & AS-SSD Synthetic Benches Page 6 - HD Tach & CrystalDiskMark Synthetic Benches Page 7 - PCMark Vantage Synthetic Benchmark Page 8 - OCZ RevoDrive - Real World Testing Page 9 - Capacity, Final Thoughts & Conclusions |
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