What's The RevoDrive Series All About?

What's The RevoDrive Series All About?

Much like the previous RevoDrive's from OCZ, the idea and principles behind the product remain the same, SSDs placed onto a PCB or multiple PCBs, tied together to a RAID controller delivering all the goodness over the PCIe bus. The technology however has been redesigned from the ground up. OCZ uses their own RAID solution with a proprietary VCA 2.0 software layer (Virtualized Controller Architecture). Then the NAND flash type in use is obviously 19nm from Toshiba (MLC). Interestingly enough you'll spot multiple SandForce series 2200 (2281) controllers on the RevoDrive 350, whereas we expected Indilinx controllers for which OCZ Storage Solutions holds the intellectual property.

As you can see, OCZ is about to release three models, with the slowest one (if you can call that slow) being the 240 GB model. The 480 GB and 960 GB models have four controllers for the NAND flash clusters, the 240 GB model however has "only" two. That makes it significantly slower as opposed to it's bigger brothers. As such you will be hovering at the 1 GB/sec marker for that model. The 480 GB and 960 GB models are sculpted for seriously nasty performance, rated at roughly 1,700 to 1,800 MB/sec for both read and write performance. Now please do understand that these numbers are are always best case scenarios and based on peak performance. Your sustained and linear writes will likely be a bit different. Good to know is that the RevoDrive is bootable, but you need to supply Windows with the appropriate drivers to recognize the controller.

Let's have a more detailed look at the actual product, anyone wants a cherry on top of that?