Thread: OCZ RevoDrive X2 quick review

Intro

I have had the good fortune of enjoying several SSD drives over the past 2 years and only one thing can beat an SSD. An SSD on steroids! This is exactly what the RevoDrive X2 is!

When faced with an upgrade decision recently, I had 2 viable options: the Crucial RealSSD C300 with Marvel 9128 controller, first to market with the SATA6G interface, or one of the numerous drives with a Sandforce SF-1200 controller.

Now the latter option posed a bit of a dilemma since I know that the SF-2200 controller will be launching soon, with almost double the speed. This poses an issue to to the SATA6G interface because it can get saturated very soon with speeds of around 500MB/s! The choice was therefore obvious...instead of waiting for the SF-2200 controller, I could buy something now that is already next gen. The contenders were from the same house...OCZ - being either the IBIS with the HSDL interface, or a RevoDrive with PCE-E interface.

To cut a long story short, I ended up going with the new RevoDrive X2 although only the 160GB baby brother, not the 240GB gigantor.



The product is very well presented in a box that's not too flashy although it is made from very thick cardboard with a nice sliding design reminiscent of a VHS tape!



First look inside the box.



Closer look showing the RevoDrive Installation and Quick Start Guide, plus a "nya-nya" sticker. LOL

Now the Quick Start Guide is not something I normally bother with but in this case it was helpful! I tried to do a bit of preparation before receiving my RevoDrive X2 but there are no dedicated webpages that I could find. Obviously the same SSD principles apply but the architecture is quite different and it would seem something would at least be different?



Front of drive. Now notice the HUGE advantage over traditional drives...no power or data interface. Barring the cost, this would be the ultimate LAN PC drive to have!

Basically there are 2 PCB's bolted together...I've read that the main PCB is the original RevoDrive with the bolt-on being the X2...not 100% sure though.



Back of drive.



Installed...how neat is that? I did not have any readily accessible PCI-E 4x slots and there's a stupid legacy PCI slot that would have been perfect. Only option was to use the PCI-E 16x slot right below my graphics card. Hope the heat does not prove to be a problem!

Benchmark!

Now it's been a while since I did any type of benching but on my previous SSD drives, I used all the usual suspects. CrystalDiskMark, ATTO, HDTune, etc. Turns out that some of these can be really bad to use. Only ATTO seems to get the "all clear" so it's all I'm using...and only ONE bench to be safe.



The peak read and write speeds are absolutely mind boggling with the read speed trumping the official spec.

Installation

OCZ made things a little bit more difficult than they needed to be by not including drivers with the RevoDrive X2. It delayed my Windows 7 install somewhat, as I had to go and haul out a notebook to download the drivers and pop them on a USB stick. Surely for a premium product, OCZ could have included them? Something like a little bonus OCZ ATV 4GB USB drive would have been real bling.

Now you need the drivers because the RevoDrive is esentially a RAID contraption. You have 4*37GB drives in RAID 0 which of course you need drivers for, before Windows 7 will even see the drive.

Windows 7 took around 10 minutes to install on my very first 128GB G.Skill Falcon SSD (with Barefoot controller) which was pretty amazing. Not sure what the new Sandforce controller drives manage but the OCZ RevoDrive X2 does it in 8.27 minutes, give or take a few seconds. This is to the last reboot. Yowza!

Windows 7 SP1 (925MB 64-bit file) took around 7 minutes to install and boot to the desktop again.

Total reported space is 148GB.

Nice bits

Well the biggest plus for me is the design. No messy cables ... not one. Then of course finally using the PCI-E bus for more than just graphics. Brilliant...SATA is really useless compared to the bandwidth that PCI-E offers.

While my HDD LED on my Akasa case does blink, I'm not sure it's still valid? To this end, OCZ have soldered on some nice blue LED's on the RevoDrive X2 to show read/write activity. There are a pair of lights up front and a bunch of them toward the rear of the drive.

Packaging stood out for me just because the retail box is so strong. Nothing flimsy like some of the SSD retail boxes I've seen to date. This will serve well during shipping as things are a bit more delicate now.

Conclusion

If you can afford it and want "more than SSD", the RevoDrive X2 has your name on it. You are literally doing a leap frog over the upcoming SF-2200 controller drives and it's something a bit different.

The RevoDrive X2 picks up as a SCSI device in the BIOS and the RAID bootstrap loader cycles pretty quickly after POST. I'm assuming you can destroy/rebuild the RAID 0 array if the need ever arises so the normal RAID warnings apply.

What the drive is missing, as with all SSD drives in RAID, is TRIM. Now people have waited so long for this feature on regular drives they don't want to do without it. But there is garbage collection so you're not totally in the dark. For the speeds you get I personally feel it's a very viable trade off.

Being on the brink of 1GB/s for desktop computers...imagine what the next year holds for SSD tech!