| OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 PCI-E Solid State Drive |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Storage | |
| Written by Olin Coles | |
| Monday, 15 August 2011 | |
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Page 4 of 11
SSD Testing MethodologySolid State Drives have traveled a long winding course to finally get where they are today. Up to this point in technology, there have been several key differences separating Solid State Drives from magnetic rotational Hard Disk Drives. While the DRAM-based buffer size on desktop HDDs has recently reached 64 MB and is ever-increasing, there is still a hefty delay in the initial response time. This is one key area in which flash-based Solid State Drives continually dominates because they lack moving parts to "get up to speed". However the benefits inherent to SSDs have traditionally fallen off once the throughput begins, even though data reads or writes are executed at a high constant rate whereas the HDD tapers off in performance. This makes the average transaction speed of a SSD comparable to the data burst rate mentioned in HDD tests, albeit usually lower than the HDD's speed. Comparing a Solid State Disk to a standard Hard Disk Drives is always relative; even if you're comparing the fastest rotational spindle speeds. One is going to be many times faster in response (SSDs), while the other is usually going to have higher throughput bandwidth (HDDs). Additionally, there are certain factors which can affect the results of a test which we do our best to avoid. SSD Testing DisclaimerEarly on in our SSD coverage, Benchmark Reviews published an article which detailed Solid State Drive Benchmark Performance Testing. The research and discussion that went into producing that article changed the way we now test SSD products. Our previous perceptions of this technology were lost on one particular difference: the wear leveling algorithm that makes data a moving target. Without conclusive linear bandwidth testing or some other method of total-capacity testing, our previous performance results were rough estimates at best. Our test results were obtained after each SSD had been prepared using DISKPART or Sanitary Erase tools. As a word of caution, applications such as these offer immediate but temporary restoration of original 'pristine' performance levels. In our tests, we discovered that the maximum performance results (charted) would decay as subsequent tests were performed. SSDs attached to TRIM enabled Operating Systems will benefit from continuously refreshed performance, whereas older O/S's will require a garbage collection (GC) tool to avoid 'dirty NAND' performance degradation. It's critically important to understand that no software for the Microsoft Windows platform can accurately measure SSD performance in a comparable fashion. Synthetic benchmark tools such as HD Tach and PCMark are helpful indicators, but should not be considered the ultimate determining factor. That factor should be measured in actual user experience of real-world applications. Benchmark Reviews includes both bandwidth benchmarks and application speed tests to present a conclusive measurement of product performance. Test System
Storage Hardware TestedThe following storage hardware has been used in our benchmark performance testing, and may be included in portions of this article:
Test Tools
Test Results DisclaimerThis article utilizes benchmark software tools to produce operational IOPS performance and bandwidth speed results. Each test was conducted in a specific fashion, and repeated for all products. These test results are not comparable to any other benchmark application, neither on this website or another, regardless of similar IOPS or MB/s terminology in the scores. The test results in this project are only intended to be compared to the other test results conducted in identical fashion for this article.
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Comments
Not that it's of any real importance but would be interested to know just how quickly this could boot into Win7.
@ OCZ They say three min.
Wow
In which case, hot # that's fast.
(550MB/sec) ... windows 7 64 boots in around 24seconds
(ASUS Rampage III Extreme & Intel Core I7 980x at 4GHz)
Also bought several X2 series for my workstations at office, they
do almost the same startup times for windows - dont think it will get
any faster than this but hey - getting my fist coffe takes longer
than 24secs so i dont care!
480GB: RVD3X2-FHPX4-480G $3,304.81NZD
for that sort of money I could buy 4x 120GB SSD's + an x4 PCIe SAS/SATA6Gbps raid controller for $1,866.07 and I'd still have plenty of money left over for a really descent PC to put it in
#tweakers.net/pricewatch/287789/ocz-revodrive-3-x2-pci-express-ssd-240gb-240gb.html#tab:prices
I don't know how much they will charge you for shipping it to New Zealand:P
but this is a minus "- SCSI architecture prohibits TRIM with Windows OS"
why even mention the + if it doesn't work
However, in this article, I wonder which SATA controller would throw up 3 or 6 GB/s...it's 3 or 6 Gb/s afaik. On the other hand, the 8 GB/s of an 8x v2.0 PCI-x are more or less enough for those beasts...
I do have a few OCZ 'Agility' and 'Solid' SSD's and I'm happy with their performance and prices.
I see OCZ as a good choice in SSD technology.