Tough Call, need some solid pros and cons

[drip50291]

So I have a RevoDrive 3 and the boot times aren't great which is to be expected. The RevoDrive 3 "screams when windows is loaded". But whats an instant compared to an instant? I'm thinking about getting a Samsung 830 or a comparable SATA SSD.

Little background for my computer usage. I don't do anything extreme like running 10 VMs at a time on my machine (or even 1), I don't run servers off my machine, and I don't think I need a RevoDrive 3 to have a fast computer. All I really do is normal windows tasks and play games like Borderlands, BFBC 2, and CS:GO. So with this being said wouldn't it make more sense to have an SSD that boots fast and still loads programs pretty quick?

Is this a pretty fair assumption? Should I, in a sense, "downgrade" to get what I would feel is an "upgrade" or am I just totally not getting the whole Revo thing? If I'm not doing anything hardcore will I really notice a difference in windows between a SATA SSD and a RevoDrive? Thanks for any help/advice/therapy guys!


P.S. I only bought a RevoDrive 3 120Gb because it was on sale for $160 and I thought it was gonna be insane. But its not.

 

[Transidium]

I have a 256GB Samsung 830, and with my OC'ed 2550K @ 4.6 GHz + 8GB RAM, Win7 boots in less than ten seconds from when I press the power button. Tweaks in the BIOS and keeping the number of startup programs to a minimum also helps. Couldn't ask for more!

 

[drip50291]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147164
VS
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227745

On paper the Revo crushes anything, but for my experience as an end user I feel the Samsung will give me fast boot times, and a happy experience once windows is up and running.

Or should just get
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227661
because that seems to have fast boot times and everyone is happy with it.

 

[drip50291]

I have a 256GB Samsung 830, and with my OC'ed 2550K @ 4.6 GHz + 8GB RAM, Win7 boots in less than ten seconds from when I press the power button. Tweaks in the BIOS and keeping the number of startup programs to a minimum also helps. Couldn't ask for more!

See this is what I thought my RevoDrive 3 would do out of the box, but not even close. I had soluto installed on my system before and after my ssd. I'm pretty sure soluto doesn't count bios load times but i could be wrong. But the HDD came up at around 1:40 and my Revo drive at around 1:30.. pretty much no difference. I paid for something that only improved my windows update times when it came to shutting down to install them, that took literally 2 seconds, but thats not worth $160.

 

[dingo07]

any SSD that is set up properly and has Windows installed optimally will not be much different then the next for how you explain you use windows.

It almost sounds like a fresh install of Windows 7 on the SSD and following some of these tips is more in line - http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/270102-32-useful-articles-part

 

[drip50291]

If you are concerned about boot times... don't boot.
Instead of shutting down and powering off, just use sleep to the s3(in ram) sleep state.
Sleep and wake will be 2-3 seconds.

It looks to me like the revodrive is doing for you just about what a SSD would do.
Reading your post, and reviews, I was a bit disappointed too.

What were you disappointed in?

 

[geofelt]

If you are concerned about boot times... don't boot.
Instead of shutting down and powering off, just use sleep to the s3(in ram) sleep state.
Sleep and wake will be 2-3 seconds.

It looks to me like the revodrive is doing for you just about what a SSD would do.
Reading your post, and reviews, I was a bit disappointed too.

 

[drip50291]

I just use windows to surf the web, do my homework, use office 2010. Really nothing fancy. I want to use my 4TB IcyDock as a source for me and my girlfriends music so i can play our library thru the xbox thru the bose system, but theres no way i'm putting both of our music collections on an SSD.

I agree that an SSD compared to another SSD is not going to be much different but where is someone gonna notice the biggest performance difference between an SSD and a HDD, boot times aside.

 

[dingo07]

don't forget that the amount and speed of memory, motherboard and processor all come into play when determining how fast a machine will boot - it's not solely dependent on the SSD or HDD

don't lose sight of the big picture

 

[geofelt]

What were you disappointed in?

Revodrive seemed like a wonderful concept that eliminated the sata bandwidth limit.
But it seems like you experienced no benefit that a conventional SSD could also provide.
It is not clear to me how they made it bootable. Perhaps that is where the slower boot times come from.

 

[drip50291]

Yea definitely. I was reading some other forums and articles and the revo x2 boots better and performs better.

I just dont get why the crystaldiskmark has the Revo3 at around 350 read and 160 write. And the moderators and support staff on the OCZ forum are just like well your using the wrong benchmark, you gotta use ATTO for compressed data. I dont get it. I just think they have bad marketing going on, the RevoDrive series is not for entry level SSD owners. Not because its difficult to setup but because first time SSD owners are going to expect a different experience. An SSD is defined by having better boot times. I just dont get the whole Revo thing.

It should be marketed for servers more than consumers. I think its in that article or another that it said people boot their machines on average 5 times a day give or take, and a server in a production network should not have to reboot that much, hopefully.

I'm glad someone agrees with me.

 

[drip50291]

don't forget that the amount and speed of memory, motherboard and processor all come into play when determining how fast a machine will boot - it's not solely dependent on the SSD or HDD

don't lose sight of the big picture

Right Dingo, my system is similar to yours. Whats your boot time and how much did it improve when you put in an SSD? And how much of a performance increase did you see in the ways you use your machine?

 

[drip50291]

Revodrive seemed like a wonderful concept that eliminated the sata bandwidth limit.
But it seems like you experienced no benefit that a conventional SSD could also provide.
It is not clear to me how they made it bootable. Perhaps that is where the slower boot times come from.

*Disclaimer* I do not claim to be an expert RevoDrive owner. But doing some few basic SSD tweaks and loading an OS right onto my Revo, this is the experience I receive. The RevoDrive is not a plug and play insanity card thats gonna melt everyone's face off that knows how to plug in a PCI-E card. There are a lot of reviews of people simply not doing it right or messing with the benchmark settings to make it look faster. Some of the boot up videos are fake and are of virtual machines that boot up in 10 secs. I just cant wait to get my money back from this thing to be honest. Or for the OCZ development team to come out with kicka** drivers..

 

[dingo07]

Right Dingo, my system is similar to yours. Whats your boot time and how much did it improve when you put in an SSD? And how much of a performance increase did you see in the ways you use your machine?

I built this machine in December (with one GTX460OC and minus the SSD) specifically for Adobe Premier Pro CS5 video editing (I had the HDDs), but I also use Photoshop and AutoCAD, and do slight gaming like CIV5 and an old BF version. My boot time was about a minute, perhaps more, I really don't remember. I added the SSD in January because I wanted the improved performance it provides overall, and boot time went to roughly 0:30 +/-. I then added the other GTX460 for SLI in February and got into TW2, Diablo3 and now Skyrim. I'm waiting for the holidays to come to get a 240GB SSD, and then I'll use the existing 60GB as a RAM drive and get even more performance.

The SSD makes a world of difference in every day use because all the progs I use are installed on it, so everything opens up in the blink of an eye. If I didn't have to type my password to get to the desktop, I would be online reading Tom's in less than 35 seconds from dead off. It boots almost as fast as my Dell XPS M1530 laptop that has a 240GB OCZ Octane.

 

[dingo07]

looking at the specs of the RevoDrive 3 PCI-Express MLC nand card (the slowest version), it's got a bandwitdth of 10Gbs which is the limitation of the x4 bus - my drive is a normal SATA III 6Gbs drive that has half the speed specs. BUT you have to read more than just the specs - like the fact that it has "OCZ's proprietary Virtualized Controller Architecture 2.0 (VCA) technology." This card is specifically designed for workstations and/or servers to be used as a data drive, but one would think twice the number of MAX read/write speeds would equate to a faster boot time...

 

[drip50291]

Best answer selected by drip50291.