Conclusion
If you’re a typical desktop user, OCZ’s RevoDrive X2 is like an AR-15 rifle in California. It’s cool to own, but it’s expensive and you can’t really use it the way it was designed to be used.
For those of you who do know what the PCI Express-based drive was built to do, it’s a damn beast. It’s possible to push this thing in excess of 600 MB/s, and we saw 4 KB random write performance greater than 100 000 IOPS. Of course, that’s in a best-case scenario where the SandForce controllers are working with highly compressible data. In more randomized situations, the RevoDrive X2 slows down significantly—but it still wipes the floor with products you’d more typically expect to find on the desktop.
In most cases, the RevoDrive X2 is able to outpace OCZ’s HSDL-attached IBIS. This is likely a result of the Revo’s direct PCI Express interface. Although there’s a bridge chip and PCI-X controller involved, the resulting conversion seems to be less severe than going from PCIe to HSDL. OCZ is probably fine with that, though. Its first-gen IBIS offering seems proof-of-concept-ish. Subsequent refreshes to the technology will be what show SAS’ insufficiency by upping throughput per HSDL channel. And dual-channel cards based on PCIe 2.0 will pave the way for up to 4000 MB/s of throughput to devices connected to a backplane. That’s not the market the RevoDrive was designed to address. IBIS has a far more enterprise-oriented vibe to it. Surely the company isn’t expecting these products to cannibalize each other.
And how about the comparison to the high-end 2.5” SATA-based SSDs that most of us in the real world can barely afford? Naturally, a Vertex 2 with one SandForce controller and 120 GB of NAND flash is going to get smoked by a RevoDrive with two SF-1200 controllers and 120 GB of flash. But if you save your pennies and stripe a pair of 60 GB Vertex 2s, you can expect similar performance for the same price.
The same can’t be said for the RevoDrive X2. Putting four 60 GB Vertex 2s in an array costs about $100 less than the convenience of the same 240 GB mounted on a PCI Express-based card. Thus, if you’re looking for value, the RevoDrive X2 is not the way to get there. If you’re looking for an easy performance-oriented solution without the hassle of manually striping SSDs, this could be the way to go.
At the same time, it’s hard to ignore the fact that OCZ recently announced support for SandForce’s next-generation controllers with native 6 Gb/s interface support and stated 500 MB/s transfer rates. We’re also expecting Intel’s third-generation SSDs based on 25 nm flash in the first quarter of this year. Surely the giant has taken notice of SandForce’s rise to prominence and has its own retaliatory strike in the works. Two thousand eleven looks to be an exciting one in the SSD world—now seems like a tough time to buy a flagship storage device that could be eclipsed in a very big way a couple of months from now.
