Final Words and Verdict
Final Words and Verdict
The RevoDrive is a nice step forward in the land of high-performance Flash based storage devices. We however have to admit that performance here and there certainly is not yet up-to snuff in all conditions we threw at it. At certain benchmarks the RevoDrive simply kills anything in it's path, but in others the overall performance is as good as a regular SSD and we find that a little weird as you buy this product to be fast in every and any scenario.
Perhaps a new firmware will solve that though, the SIS RAID controller is easily upgradeable through Windows. That said, the move to PCIe based NAND flash storage definitely is a good one. We break free of the limitations set by the SATA II controller. Though our results were a little flaky here and there, we also have to acknowledge that some tests indeed reached well over 400 and even 500 MB./sec on this drive. It literally is a blazing fast storage unit that will blow you away.
The SIS RAID controller is a semi-software based solution (I like to call that fakeRAID), initially I was afraid that this would hog valuable CPU cycles, I'm happy to report that on average we'd notice 1 maybe 2% CPU utilization, so that is very little. Nothing to complain there.
The big advantage of the RevoDrive over the much more expensive competition from Fusion IO (ioDrive) is the fact that the RevoDrive is in fact bootable. This means you can install your operating system onto the Revodrive.
Does the overall cost outweighs the benefits ? Well:
- The 120GB RevoDrive will cost you $369.99, that's a whopping 3.08 USD per GB.
- The Vertex 2 120GB will cost you $309, but you do loose on performance over the RevoDrive, that' 2.58 USD per GB
- Two Vertex 2 60GB will cost you 350 USD, that's 2.92 USD per GB. Pretty much any motherboard will allow you to go RAID0 on two of these, especially the latest motherboards.
So that's tough decision there, personally I feel that the RevoDrive needs to drop in price below two 60 GB units in order for it to get attractive, and even then it's very expensive of course.
That said, we acknowledge that this storage unit is sexy, and the first in a series which over the years will become popular alright. It surely is the very first consumer SSD based storage unit that reaches unprecedented performance at 500 MB/sec in some scenario's. 
We just love innovation, new stuff and sheer performance and if there is one company out there alright, pushing the envelope then that's OCZ. We like this product series very much. It does need a few tweaks before we can intensely recommend it, but the product as it is right now, is already very sexy. If you run your OS and applications on this, you have no idea what is coming at you on terms of speed and load times, awesome stuff.
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